
CopghtlJ". 



! -^ O O 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION 

OF THE WORKS OF 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
ACROSS THE PLAINS 

WITH OTHER MEMORIES AND ESSAYS 



THE BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION 
OF STEVENSON'S WORKS 

NOVELS AND ROMANCES 

TREASURE ISLAND 

PRINCE OTTO 

KIDNAPPED 

THE BLACK ARROW 

THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE 

THE WRONG BOX 

THE WRECKER 

DAVID BALFOUR 

THE EBB-TIDE 

WEIR OF HERMISTON 

ST. IVES 

SHORTER STORIES 

NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS 

THE DYNAMITER 

THE MERRY MEN, containing DR. 

JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 
ISLAND NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENTS 

ESSATS, TRAVELS, AND SKETCHES 
AN INLAND VOYAGE 
TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY 
VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 
FAMILIAR STUDIES 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT, f»n/<j«w«n^ 

THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 
MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 
IN THE SOUTH SEAS 
ACROSS THE PLAINS 
ESSAYS OF TRAVEL AND IN THE 
ART OF WRITING 

POEMS 
COMPLETE POEMS 

Twenty-five volumes. Sold singly or in sets 
Per vol.. Cloth, $1.00 ; Limp Leather, $f.2J net. 

Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 



BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION 



ACROSS 
THE PLAINS 

WITH OTHER MEMORIES 
AND ESSAYS 



BY 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1905 



I wo Oopies !ioct«vc\i I 

AUG 17 iyU6 
Oopyritriic cituy 

I ' COPV •5. 

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Copyright, i8g2, igo^ 
By Charles Scribner's Sons 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. 



VJ 



TO 
PAUL BOURGET 

Traveller and student and curious as you are, you will 
never have heard the name of Vailima, most likely not even 
that of Upolu, and Samoa itself may be strange to your ears. 
To these barbaric seats there came the other day a yellow 
book with your name on the title, and filled in every page 
with the exquisite gifts of your art. Let me take and change 
your own words : fai beau admirer les autres de toutes mes 
forces^ c''est avec vous que je tjie co7nplais a vivre. 

R. L. S. 
Vailima, 
Upolu, 
Samoa. 



LETTER TO THE AUTHOR 

My Dear Stevenson : 

You have trusted me with the choice and arrangement of 
these papers, written before you departed to the South Seas, 
and have asked me to add a preface to the volume. But it is 
your prose the pubhc wish to read, not mine; and I am sure 
they will willingly be spared the preface. Acknowledgments 
are due in your name to the publishers of the several maga- 
zines from which the papers are collected, viz. Fraser'^s, Long- 
man'' s, the Magazine of Art, and Scribner's. I will only add, 
lest any reader should find the tone of the concluding pieces 
less inspiriting than your wont, that they were written under 
circumstances of especial gloom and sickness. " I agree with 
you the lights seem a little turned down," so you write to me 
now ; "the truth is I was far through, and came none too soon 
to the South Seas, where I was to recover peace of body and 
mind. And however low the lights, the stuff is true. . . ." 
Well, inasmuch as the South Sea sirens have breathed new 
life into you, we are bound to be heartily grateful to them, 
though as they keep you so far removed from us, it is difficult 
not to bear them a grudge; and if they would reconcile us 
quite, they have but to do two things more — to teach you new 
tales that shall charm us like your old, and to spare you, at 
least once in a while in summer, to climates within reach of us 
who are task-bound for ten months in the year beside the 

Thames. 

Yours ever, 

SIDNEY COLVIN. 
February, 1892. 



CONTENTS' 

Page 

Across the Plains 3 

The Old Pacific Capital 78 

fontainebleau . . i09 

Random Memories 144 

Random Memories (Continued) 165 

The Lantern-Bearers 183 

A Chapter on Dreams 206 

Beggars 231 

Letter to a Young Gentleman 250 

PuLvis ET Umbra 267 

A Christmas Sermon 280 

1 " Epilogue to 'An Inland Voyage'" has been transferred to 
" An Inland Voyage " in this Edition. 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 

WITH OTHER MEMORIES AND ESSAYS 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 5 

I picked up my bundles and got under way, it was 
only to exchange discomfort for downright misery 
and danger. 

I followed the porters into a long shed reaching 
down-hill from West Street to the river. It was 
dark, the wind blew clean through it from end to 
end ; and here I found a great block of passengers 
and baggage, hundreds of one and tons of the 
other. I feel I shall have a difficulty to make my- 
self believed; and certainly the scene must have 
been exceptional, for it was too dangerous for 
daily repetition. It was a tight jam; there was 
no fair way through the mingled mass of brute 
and living obstruction. Into the upper skirts of 
the crowd porters, infuriated by hurry and over- 
w^ork, clove their way with shouts. I may say that 
we stood like sheep, and that the porters charged 
among us like so many maddened sheep-dogs; and 
I believe these men were no longer answerable for 
their acts. It mattered not what they were carry- 
ing, they drove straight into the press, and when 
they could get no farther, blindly discharged their 
barrowful. With my own hand, for instance, I 



6 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

saved the life of a child as it sat upon its mother's 
knee, she sitting on a box; and since I heard of 
no accident, I must suppose that there were many 
similar interpositions in the course of the evening. 
It will give some idea of the state of mind to which 
we were reduced if I tell you that neither the porter 
nor the mother of the child paid the least attention 
to my act. It was not till some time after that I 
understood what I had done myself, for to ward off 
heavy boxes seemed at the moment a natural in- 
cident of human life. Cold, wet, clamour, dead 
opposition to progress, such as one encounters in 
an evil dream, had utterly daunted the spirits. We 
had accepted this purgatory as a child accepts the 
conditions of the world. For my part, I shivered 
a little, and my back ached wearily; but I believe 
I had neither a hope nor a fear, and all the activ- 
ities of my nature had become tributary to one 
massive sensation of discomfort. 

At length, and after how long an interval I 
hesitate to guess, the crowd began to move, heavily 
straining through itself. About the same time 
some lamps w^ere lighted, and threw a sudden flare 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 7 

over the shed. We were being filtered out into 
the river boat for Jersey City. You may imagine 
how slowly this filtering proceeded, through the 
dense, choking crush, every one overladen with 
packages or children, and yet under the necessity 
of fishing out his ticket by the way ; but it ended 
at length for me, and I found myself on deck under 
a flimsy awning and with a trifle of elbow-room 
to stretch and breathe in. This was on the star- 
board ; for the bulk of the emigrants stuck hope- 
lessly on the port side, by which we had entered. 
In vain the seamen shouted to them to move on, 
and threatened them wath shipwreck. These poor 
people were under a spell of stupor, and did not 
stir a foot. It rained as heavily as ever, but the 
wind now came in sudden claps and capfuls, not 
without danger to a boat so badly ballasted as 
ours ; and we crept over the river in the darkness, 
trailing one paddle in the water like a wounded 
duck, and passed ever and again by huge, illumi- 
nated steamers running many knots, and heralding 
their approach by strains of music. The contrast 
between these pleasure embarkations and our ow^n 



8 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

grim vessel, with her hst to port and her freight 
of wet and silent emigrants, was of that glaring 
description which we count too obvious for the 
purposes of art. 

The landing at Jersey City was done in a stam- 
pede. I had a fixed sense of calamity, and to judge 
by conduct, the same persuasion was common to 
us all. A panic selfishness, like that produced by 
fear, presided over the disorder of our landing. 
People pushed, and elbowed, and ran, the families 
following how they could. Children fell, and were 
picked up to be rewarded by a blow. One child, 
who had lost her parents, screamed steadily and 
with increasing shrillness, as though verging 
towards a fit; an official kept her by him, but no 
one else seemed so much as to remark her distress ; 
and I am ashamed to say that I ran among the 
rest. I was so weary that I had twice to make a 
halt and set down my bundles in the hundred yards 
or so between the pier and the railway station, 
so that I was quite wet by the time that I got under 
cover. There was no waiting-room, no refresh- 
ment room ; the cars were locked ; and for at least 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 9 

another hour, or so it seemed, we had to camp 
upon the draughty, gasht platform. I sat on my 
vaHse, too crushed to observe my neighbours; but 
as they were all cold, and wet, and weary, and 
driven stupidly crazy by the mismanagement to 
which we had been subjected, I believe they can 
have been no happier than myself. I bought half- 
a-dozen oranges from a boy, for oranges and nuts 
were the only refection to be had. As only two of 
them had even a pretence of juice, I threw the 
other four under the cars, and beheld, as in a 
dream, grown people and children groping on the 
track after my leavings. 

At last we were admitted into the cars, utterly 
dejected, and far from dry. For my own part, 
I got out a clothes-brush, and brushed my trousers 
as hard as I could till I had dried them and warmed 
my blood into the bargain; but no one else, ex- 
cept my next neighbour to whom I lent the brush, 
appeared to take the least precaution. As they 
were, they composed themselves to sleep. I had 
seen the lights of Philadelphia, and been twice 
ordered to change carriages and twice counter- 



lo ACROSS THE PLAINS 

manded, before I allowed myself to follow their 
example. 

Tuesday. — When I awoke, it was already day ; 
the train was standing idle; I was in the last car- 
riage, and, seeing some others strolling to and fro 
about the lines, I opened the door and stepped 
forth, as from a caravan by the wayside. We were 
near no station, nor even, as far as I could see, 
within reach of any signal. A green, open, undu- 
lating country stretched away upon all sides. 
Locust trees and a single field of Indian corn 
gave it a foreign grace and interest; but the con- 
tours of the land were soft and English. It was 
not cjuite England, neither was it quite France; 
yet like enough either to seem natural in my eyes. 
And it was in the sky, and not upon the earth, that 
I was surprised to find a change. Explain it how 
you may, and for my part I cannot explain it at 
all, the sun rises with a different splendour in 
America and Europe. There is more clear gold 
and scarlet in our old country mornings; more 
purple, brown, and smoky orange in those of the 
new. It may be from habit, but to me the coming 



ACROSS THE PLAINS ii 

of day is less fresh and inspiriting in the latter; 
it has a duskier glory, and more nearly resembles 
sunset; it seems to fit some subsequential, evening 
epoch of the world, as though America were in 
fact, and not merely in fancy, farther from the 
orient of Aurora and the springs of day. I thought 
so then, by the railroad side in Pennsylvania, and 
I have thought so a dozen times since in far distant 
parts of the continent. If it be an illusion it is one 
very deeply rooted, and in which my eyesight is 
accomplice. 

Soon after a train whisked by, announcing and 
accompanying its passage by the swift beating of 
a sort of chapel bell upon the engine; and as it 
was for this we had been waiting, we were sum- 
moned by the cry of " All aboard ! " and went on 
again upon our way. The whole line, it appeared, 
was topsy-turvy; an accident at midnight having 
thrown all the traffic hours into arrear. We paid 
for this in the flesh, for we had no meals all that 
day. Fruit we could buy upon the cars; and now 
and then we had a few minutes at some station 
with a meagre show of rolls and sandwiches for 



•12 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

sale; but we were so many and so ravenous that, 
though I tried at every opportunity, the coffee was 
always exhausted before I could elbow my way to 
the counter. 

Our American sunrise had ushered in a noble 
summer's day. There was not a cloud; the sun- 
shine was baking; yet in the woody river valleys 
among which we wound our way, the atmosphere 
preserved a sparkling freshness till late in the 
afternoon. It had an inland sweetness and variety 
to one newly from the sea; it smelt of woods, 
rivers, and the delved earth. These, though in so 
far a country, were airs from home. I stood on 
the platform by the hour; and as I saw, one after 
another, pleasant villages, carts upon the highway 
and fishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows 
and cheery voices in the distance, and beheld the 
sun, no longer shining blankly on the plains of 
ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his 
light dispersed and coloured by a thousand acci- 
dents of form and surface, I began to exult with 
myself upon this rise in life like a man who had 
come into a rich estate. And when I had asked the 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 13 

name of a river from the brakesman, and heard 
that it was cahed the Susquehanna, the beauty of 
the name seemed to be part and parcel of the beauty 
of the land. As when Adam with divine fitness 
named the creatures, so this word Susquehanna 
was at once accepted by the fancy. That was the 
name, as no other could be, for that shining river 
and desirable valley. 

None can care for literature in itself who do not 
take a special pleasure in the sound of names ; and 
there is no part of the world where nomenclature 
is so rich, poetical, humourous, and picturesque as 
the United States of America. All times, races, 
and languages have brought their contribution. 
Pekin is in the same State with Euclid, with Belle- 
fontaine, and with Sandusky. Chelsea, with its 
London associations of red brick, Sloane Square, 
and the King's Road, is own suburb to stately and 
primeval Memphis; there they have their seat, 
translated names of cities, where the Mississippi 
runs by Tennessee and Arkansas ; ^ and both, 
while I was crossing the continent, lay, watched 

1 Please pronounce Arkansaw, with the accent on the first. 



14 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

by armed men, in the horror and isolation of a 
plague. Old, red Manhattan lies, like an Indian 
arrowhead under a steam factory, below anglified 
New York. The names of the States and Terri- 
tories themselves form a chorus of sweet and most 
romantic vocables : Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, 
Florida, Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota, and 
the Carolinas; there are few poems with a nobler 
music for the ear : a songful, tuneful land ; and 
if the new Homer shall arise from the Western 
continent, his verse will be enriched, his pages sing 
spontaneously, with the names of States and cities 
that would strike the fancy in a business circular. 

Late in the evening we were landed in a waiting- 
room at Pittsburg. I had now under my charge a 
young and sprightly Dutch widow with her chil- 
dren ; these I was to watch over providentially for 
a certain distance farther on the way; but as I 
found she was furnished with a basket of eatables. 
I left her in the waiting-room to seek a dinner for 
myself. 

I mention this meal, not only because it w^as the 
first of which I had partaken for about thirty 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 15 

hours, but because it was the means of my first 
introduction to a coloured gentleman. He did me 
the honour to wait upon me after a fashion, while 
I was eating; and with every word, look, and ges- 
ture marched me farther into the country of sur- 
prise. He was indeed strikingly unlike the negroes 
of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, or the Christy Minstrels 
of my youth. Imagine a gentleman, certainly 
somewhat dark, but of a pleasant warm hue, speak- 
ing English with a slight and rather odd foreign 
accent, every inch a man of the world, and armed 
with manners so patronisingly superior that I am 
at a loss to name their parallel in England. A 
butler perhaps rides as high over the unbutlered, 
but then he sets you right with a reserve and a sort 
of sighing patience which one is often moved to 
admire. And again, the abstract butler never 
stoops to familiarity. But the coloured gentleman 
will pass you a wink at a time ; he is familiar like 
an upper form boy to a fag; he unbends to you 
like Prince Hal with Poins and Falstaff. He 
makes himself at home and welcome. Indeed, I 
may say, this waiter behaved himself to me 



i6 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

throughout that supper much as, with us, a young, 
free, and not very self-respecting master might 
behave to a good-looking chambermaid. I had 
come prepared to pity the poor negro, to put him 
at his ease, to prove in a thousand condescensions 
that I was no sharer in the prejudice of race; but 
I assure you I put my patronage away for another 
occasion, and had the grace to be pleased with that 
result. 

Seeing he was a very honest fellow, I consulted 
him upon a point of etiquette: if one should offer 
to tip the American waiter ? Certainly not, he told 
me. Never. It would not do. They considered 
themselves too highly to accept. They would even 
resent the offer. As for him and me, we had en- 
joyed a very pleasant conversation; he, in par- 
ticular, had found much pleasure in my society; 
I was a stranger; this was exactly one of those 
rare conjunctures. . . . Without being very clear- 
seeing, I can still perceive the sun at noonday; 
and the coloured gentleman deftly pocketed a 
quarter. 

Wednesday. — A little after midnight I convoyed 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 17 

my widow and orphans on board the train; and 
morning found us far into Ohio. This had early 
been a favourite home of my imagination ; I have 
played at being in Ohio by the week, and enjoyed 
some capital sport there with a dummy gun, my 
person being still unbreeched. My preference was 
founded on a work which appeared in CasscU's 
Family Paper, and was read aloud to me by my 
nurse. It narrated the doings of one Custaloga, 
an Indian brave, who, in the last chapter, very 
obligingly washed the paint off his face and became 
Sir Reginald Somebody-or-other ; a trick I never 
forgave him. The idea of a man being an Indian 
brave, and then giving that up to be a baronet, 
was one which my mind rejected. It offended 
verisimilitude, like the pretended anxiety of Robin- 
son Crusoe and others to escape from uninhabited 
islands. 

But Ohio was not at all as I had pictured it. 
We were now on those great plains which stretch 
unbroken to the Rocky Mountains. The country 
was flat like Holland, but far from being dull. All 
through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, or for 



i8 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

as much as I saw of them from the train and in 
my waking moments, it was rich and various, and 
breathed an elegance pecuhar to itself. The tall 
corn pleased the eye; the trees were graceful in 
themselves, and framed the plain into long, aerial 
vistas; and the clean, bright, gardened townships 
spoke of country fare and pleasant summer even- 
ings on the stoop. It was a sort of flat paradise; 
but, I am afraid, not unfrequented by the devil. 
That morning dawned with such a freezing chill 
as I have rarely felt; a chill that was not perhaps 
so measurable by instrument, as it struck home 
upon the heart and seemed to travel with the blood. 
Day came in with a shudder. White mists lay 
thinly over the surface of the plain, as w^e see them 
more often on a lake; and though the sun had 
soon dispersed and drunk them up, leaving an 
atmosphere of fever heat and crystal pureness from 
horizon to horizon, the mists had still been there, 
and we knew that this paradise was haunted by 
killing damps and foul malaria. The fences along 
the line bore but two descriptions of advertisement ; 
one to recommend tobaccos, and the other to vaunt 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 19 

remedies against the ague. At the point of day, 
and while we were all in the grasp of that first chill, 
a native of the State, who had got in at some way 
station, pronounced it, with a doctoral air, '' a 
fever and ague morning." 

The Dutch widow was a person of some charac- 
ter. She had conceived at first sight a great 
aversion for the present writer, which she was at 
no pains to conceal. But being a woman of a prac- 
tical spirit, she made no dif^culty about accepting 
my attentions, and encouraged me to buy her chil- 
dren fruits and candies, to carry all her parcels, 
and even to sleep upon the floor that she might 
profit by my empty seat. Nay, she was such a 
rattle by nature, and so powerfully moved to 
autobiographical talk, that she was forced, for 
want of a better, to take me into confidence and tell 
me the story of her life. I heard about her late 
husband, who seemed to have made his chief im- 
pression by taking her out pleasuring on Sundays. 
I could tell you her prospects, her hopes, the 
amount of her fortune, the cost of her housekeep- 
ing by the week, and a variety of particular matters 



20 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

that are not usually disclosed except to friends. 
At one station, she shook up her children to look 
at a man on the platform and say if he were not 
like Mr. Z. ; while to me she explained how she 
had been keeping company with this Mr. Z., how 
far matters had proceeded, and how it was because 
of his desistance that she was now travelling to the 
west. Then, when I was thus put in possession 
of the facts, she asked my judgment on that type 
of manly beauty. I admired it to her heart's con- 
tent. She was not, I think, remarkably veracious 
in talk, but broidered as fancy prompted, and built 
castles in the air out of her past; yet she had that 
sort of candour, to keep me, in spite of all these 
confidences, steadily aware of her aversion. Her 
parting words were ingeniously honest. " I am 
sure," said she, " we all ought to be very much 
obliged to you." I cannot pretend that she put 
me at my ease ; but I had a certain respect for sucji 
a genuine dislike. A poor nature would have 
slipped, in the course of these familiarities, into a 
sort of worthless toleration for me. 

We reached Chicago in the evening. I was 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 21 

turned out of the cars, bundled into an omnibus, 
and driven off through the streets to the station of 
a different railroad. Chicago seemed a great and 
gloomy city. I remember having subscribed, let 
us say sixpence, towards its restoration at the 
period of the fire ; and now when I beheld street 
after street of ponderous houses and crowds of 
comfortable burghers, I thought it would be a 
graceful act for the corporation to refund that six- 
pence, or, at the least, to entertain me to a cheerful 
dinner. But there was no word of restitution. I 
was that city's benefactor, yet I w^as received in a 
third-class waiting-room, and the best dinner I 
could get was a dish of ham and eggs at my own 
expense. 

I can safely say, I have never been so dog-tired 
as that night in Chicago. When it was time to 
start, I descended the platform like a man in a 
dream. It was a long train, lighted from end to 
end ; and car after car, as I came up with it, was 
not only filled but overflowing. My valise, my 
knapsack, my rug, with those six ponderous tomes 
of Bancroft, weighed me double ; I was hot, fever- 



22 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

ish, painfully athirst; and there was a great 
darkness over me, an internal darkness, not to be 
dispelled by gas. When at last I found an empty 
bench, I sank into it like a bundle of rags, the 
world seemed to swim away into the distance, and 
my consciousness dwindled within me to a mere 
pin's head, like a taper on a foggy night. 

When I came a little more to myself, I found 
that there had sat down beside me a very cheerful, 
rosy little German gentleman, somewhat gone in 
drink, who was talking away to me, nineteen to 
the dozen, as they say. I did my best to keep up 
the conversation; for it seemed to me dimly as if 
something depended upon that. I heard him re- 
late, among many other things, that there were 
pickpockets on the train, who had already robbed 
a man of forty dollars and a return ticket; but 
though I caught the words, I do not think I prop- 
erly understood the sense until next morning; and 
I believe I replied at the time that I was very glad 
to hear it. What else he talked about I have no 
guess ; I remember a gabbling sound of words, 
his profuse gesticulation, and his smile, which was 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 23 

highly explanatory; but no more. And I suppose 
I must have shown my confusion very plainly ; for, 
first, I saw him knit his brows at me like one who 
has conceived a doubt ; next, he tried me in Ger- 
man, supposing perhaps that I was unfamiliar with 
the English tongue ; and finally, in despair, he rose 
and left me, I felt chagrined ; but my fatigue was 
too crushing for delay, and, stretching myself as 
far as that was possible upon the bench, I was 
received at once into a dreamless stupor. 

The little German gentleman was only going a 
little way into the suburbs after a diner fin, and 
was bent on entertainment while the journey 
lasted. Having failed with me, he pitched next 
upon another emigrant, who had come through 
from Canada, and was not one jot less weary than 
myself. Nay, even in a natural state, as I found 
next morning when we scraped acquaintance, he 
was a heavy, uncommunicative man. After trying 
him on different topics, it appears that the little 
German gentleman flounced into a temper, swore 
an oath or two, and departed from that car in quest 
of livelier society. Poor little gentleman ! I sup- 



24 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

pose he thought an emigrant should be a rolhcking, 
free-hearted blade, with a flask of foreign brandy 
and a long, comical story to beguile the moments 
of digestion. 

Thursday. — I suppose there must be a cycle in 
the fatigue of travelling, for when I awoke next 
morning, I was entirely renewed in spirits and ate 
a hearty breakfast of porridge, with sweet milk, 
and coffee and hot cakes, at Burlington upon the 
Mississippi. Another long day's ride followed, 
with but one feature w^orthy of remark. At a 
place called Creston, a drunken man got in. He 
was aggressively friendly, but, according to Eng- 
lish notions, not at all unpresentable upon a train. 
For one stage he eluded the notice of the officials ; 
l^ut just as wx were beginning to move out of the 
next station, Cromwell by name, by came the 
conductor. There was a word or two of talk ; and 
then the official had the man by the shoulders, 
twitched him from his seat, marched him through 
the car, and sent him flying on to the track. It was 
done in three motions, as exact as a piece of drill. 
The train was still moving slowly, although be- 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 25 

ginning to mend her pace, and the drunkard got 
his feet without a fall. He carried a red bundle, 
though not so red as his cheeks; and he shook this 
menacingly in the air with one hand, while the 
other stole behind him to the region of the kidneys. 
It was the first indication that I had come amonsf 
revolvers, and I observed it with some emotion. 
The conductor stood on the steps with one hand 
on his hip, looking back at him ; and perhaps this 
attitude imposed upon the creature, for he turned 
without further ado, and went off staggering along 
the track towards Cromwell, followed by a peal 
of laughter from the cars. They were speaking 
English all about me, but I knew I w^as in a 
foreign land. 

Twenty minutes before nine that night, w^e were 
deposited at the Pacific Transfer Station near 
Council Bluffs, on the eastern bank of the Missouri 
River. Here we were to stay the night at a kind 
of caravanserai, set apart for emigrants. But I 
gave way to a thirst for luxury, separated myself 
from my companions, and marched with my effects 
into the Union Pacific Hotel. A white clerk and 



i6 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

a coloured gentleman whom, in my plain European 
way, I should call the boots, were installed behind 
a counter like bank tellers. They took my name, 
assigned me a number, and proceeded to deal with 
my packages. And here came the tug of war. 
I wished to give up my packages into safe keep- 
ing; but I did not wish to go to bed. And this, 
it appeared, was impossible in an American hotel. 
It was, of course, some inane misunderstanding, 
and sprang from my unfamiliarity with the lan- 
guage. For although two nations use the same 
words and read the same books, intercourse is not 
conducted by the dictionary. The business of life 
is not carried on by words, but in set phrases, each 
with a special and almost a slang signification. 
Some international obscurity prevailed between me 
and the coloured gentleman at Council Bluffs ; so 
that what I was asking, which seemed very nat- 
ural to me, appeared to him a monstrous exigency. 
He refused, and that with the plainness of the 
West. This American manner of conducting mat- 
ters of business is, at first, highly unpalatable to 
the European. When we approach a man in the 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 27 

way of his calling, and for those services by which 
he earns his bread, we consider him for the time 
being our hired servant. But in the American 
opinion, two gentlemen meet and have a friendly 
talk with a view to exchanging favours if they 
shall agree to please. I know not which is the 
more convenient, nor even which is the more truly 
courteous. The English stiffness unfortunately 
tends to be continued after the particular trans- 
action is at an end, and thus favours class sepa- 
rations. But on the other hand, these equalitarian 
plainnesses leave an open field for the insolence 
of Jack-in-office. 

I was nettled by the coloured gentleman's re- 
fusal, and unbuttoned my wrath under the simili- 
tude of ironical submission. I knew nothing, I 
said, of the ways of American hotels; but I had 
no desire to give trouble. If there was nothing 
for it but to get to bed immediately, let him say 
the word, and though it was not my habit, I should 
cheerfully obey. 

He burst into a shout of laughter. " Ah ! " said 
he, " you do not know about America. They are 



28 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

fine people in America. Oh! you will like them 
very well. But you must n't get mad. I know 
what you want. You come along with me." 

And issuing from behind the counter, and taking 
me by the arm like an old acquaintance, he led 
me to the bar of the hotel. 

" There," said he, pushing me from him by the 
shoulder, " go and have a drink ! " 

THE EMIGRANT TRAIN 

All this while I had been travelling by mixed 
trains, where I might meet with Dutch widows 
and little German gentry fresh from table. I had 
been but a latent emigrant ; now I was to be 
branded once more, and put apart with my fel- 
lows. It was about two in the afternoon of Friday 
that I found myself in front of the Emigrant 
House, with more than a hundred others, to be 
sorted and boxed for the journey. A white-haired 
official, with a stick under one arm, and a list in 
the other hand, stood apart in front of us, and 
called name after name in the tone of a command. 
At each name you would see a family gather up 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 29 

its brats and bundles and run for the hindmost of 
the three cars that stood awaiting us, and I soon 
conckided that this was to be set apart for the 
women and children. The second or central car, • 
it turned out, was devoted to men travelling alone, 
and the third to the Chinese. The official was 
easily moved to anger at the least delay; but the 
emigrants were both quick at answering their 
names, and speedy in getting themselves and their 
effects on board. 

The families once housed, we men carried the 
second car without ceremony by simultaneous as- 
sault. I suppose the reader has some notion of an 
American railroad car, that long, narrow wooden 
box, like a flat-roofed Noah's ark, with a stove 
and a convenience, one at either end, a passage 
down the middle, and transverse benches upon 
either hand. Those destined for emigrants on the 
Union Pacific are only remarkable for their ex- 
treme plainness, nothing but w^ood entering in any 
part into their constitution, and for the usual in- 
efficacy of the lamps, which often went out and 
shed but a dying glimmer even while they burned. 



30 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

The benches are too short for anything but a young 
child. Where there is scarce elbow-room for two 
to sit, there will not be space enough for one to 
lie. Hence the company, or rather, as it appears 
from certain bills about the Transfer Station, the 
company's servants, have conceived a plan for the 
better accommodation of travellers. They prevail 
on every two to chum together. To each of the 
chums they sell a board and three square cushions 
stuffed with straw, and covered with thin cotton. 
The benches can be made to face each other in 
pairs, for the backs are reversible. On the ap- 
proach of night the boards are laid from bench to 
bench, making a couch wide enough for two, and 
long enough for a man of the middle height ; and 
the chums lie down side by side upon the cushions 
with the head to the conductor's van and the feet 
to the engine. When the train is full, of course 
this plan is impossible, for there must not be more 
than one to every bench, neither can it be carried 
out unless the chums agree. It was to bring about 
this last condition that our white-haired official 
now bestirred himself. He made a most active 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 31 

master of ceremonies, introducing likely couples, 
and even guaranteeing the amiability and honesty 
of each. The greater the number of happy couples 
the better for his pocket, for it was he who sold 
the raw material of the beds. His price for one 
board and three straw cushions began with two 
dollars and a half; but before the train left, and, 
I am sorry to say, long after I had purchased 
mine, it had fallen to one dollar and a half. 

The match-maker had a difficulty with me ; per- 
haps, like some ladies, I showed myself too eager 
for union at any price ; but certainly the first who 
was picked out to be my bedfellow, declined the 
honour without thanks. He was an old, heavy, 
slow-spoken man, I think from Yankeeland, looked 
me all over with great timidity, and then began to 
excuse himself in broken phrases. He did n't know 
the young man, he said. The young man might 
be very honest, but how was he to know that? 
There was another young man whom he had met 
already in the train; he guessed he was honest, 
and would prefer to chum with him upon the 
whole. All this without any sort of excuse, as 



32 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

though I had been inanimate or absent. I began 
to tremble lest every one should refuse my com- 
pany, and I be left rejected. But the next in turn 
was a tall, strapping, long-limbed, small-headed, 
curly-haired Pennsylvania Dutchman, with a sol- 
dierly smartness in his manner. To be exact, he 
had acquired it in the navy. But that was all one ; 
he had at least been trained to desperate resolves, 
so he accepted the match, and the white-haired 
swindler pronounced the connubial benediction, and 
pocketed his fees. 

The rest of the afternoon was spent in making 
up the train. I am afraid to say how many bag- 
gage-waggons followed the engine, certainly a 
score; then came the Chinese, then we, then the 
families, and the rear was brought up by the con- 
ductor in what, if I have it rightly, is called his 
caboose. The class to which I belonged was of 
course far the largest, and we ran over, so to 
speak, to both sides ; so that there were some 
Caucasians among the Chinamen, and some bach- 
elors among the families. But our own car was 
pure from admixture, save for one little boy of 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 33 

eight or nine, who had the whooping-cough. At 
last, about six, the long train crawled out of the 
Transfer Station and across the wide Missouri 
River to Omaha, westward bound. 

It was a troubled uncomfortable evening in the 
cars. There was thunder in the air, which helped 
to keep us restless. A man played many airs upon 
the cornet, and none of them were much attended 
to, until he came to " Home, Sweet Home." It was 
truly strange to note how the talk ceased at that, 
and the faces began to lengthen. I have no idea 
whether musically this air is to be considered good 
or bad; but it belongs to that class of art which 
may be best described as a brutal assault upon the 
feelings. Pathos must be relieved by dignity of 
treatment. If you wallow naked in the pathetic, 
like the author of "Home, Sweet Home," you make 
your hearers weep in an unmanly fashion ; and 
even while yet they are moved, they despise them- 
selves and hate the occasion of their weakness. It 
did not come to tears that night, for the experi- 
ment was interrupted. An elderly, hard-looking 
man, with a goatee beard and about as much 



34 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

appearance of sentiment as you would expect from 
a retired slaver, turned with a start and bade the 
performer stop that '' damned thing." " I 've 
heard about enough of that," he added ; " give us 
something about the good country we 're going 
to." A murmur of adhesion ran round the car; 
the performer took the instrument from his lips, 
laughed and nodded, and then struck into a danc- 
ing measure; and, like a new Timotheus, stilled 
immediately the emotion he had raised. 

The day faded ; the lamps were lit ; a party of 
wild young men, who got off next evening at 
North Platte, stood together on the stern platform, 
singing " The Sweet By-and-by " with very tune- 
ful voices ; the chums began to put up their beds ; 
and it seemed as if the business of the day were 
at an end. But it was not so; for, the train 
stopping at some station, the cars were instantly 
thronged with the natives, wives and fathers, young 
men and maidens, some of them in little more than 
nightgear, some with stable lanterns, and all offer- 
ing beds for sale. Their charge began with twenty- 
five cents a cushion, but fell, before the train went 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 3s 

on again, to fifteen, with the bed-board gratis, or 
less than one-fifth of what I had paid for mine at 
the Transfer. This is my contribution to the econ- 
omy of future emigrants. 

A great personage on an American train is the 
newsboy. He sells books (such books!), papers, 
fruit, lollipops, and cigars; and on emigrant jour- 
neys, soap, towels, tin washing-dishes, tin cofTee- 
pitchers, coffee, tea, sugar, and tinned eatables, 
mostly hash or beans and bacon. Early next 
morning the newsboy went around the cars, and 
chumming on a more extended principle became 
the order of the hour. It requires but a copartnery 
of two to manage beds ; but washing and eating 
can be carried on most economically by a syndi- 
cate of three. I myself entered a little after sun- 
rise into articles of agreement, and became one of 
the firm of Pennsylvania, Shakespeare, and Du- 
buque. Shakespeare was my own nickname on 
the cars ; Pennsylvania that of my bedfellow ; and 
Dubuque, the name of a place in the State of 
Iowa, that of an amiable young fellow going west 
to cure an asthma, and retarding his recovery by 



36 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

incessantly chewing or smoking, and sometimes 
chewing and smoking together. I have never seen 
tobacco so silHly abused. Shakespeare bought a 
tin washing-dish, Dubuque a towel, and Pennsyl- 
vania a brick of soap. The partners used these 
instruments, one after another, according to the 
order of their first awaking; and when the firm 
had finished there was no want of borrowers. 
Each filled the tin dish at the water filter opposite 
the stove, and retired with the whole stock in 
trade to the platform of the car. There he knelt 
down, supporting himself by a shoulder against 
the woodwork or one elbow crooked about the 
railing, and made a shift to wash his face and 
neck and hands; a cold, an insufficient, and, if the 
train is moving rapidly, a somewhat dangerous 
toilet. 

On a similar division of expense, the firm of 
Pennsylvania, Shakespeare, and Dubuque supplied 
themselves with coffee, sugar, and necessary ves- 
sels ; and their operations are a type of what went 
on through all the cars. Before the sun was up 
the stove would be brightly burning; at the first 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 37 

station the natives would come on board with milk 
and eggs and coffee-cakes ; and soon from end to 
end the car would be filled with little parties break- 
fasting upon the bed-boards. It was the pleasant- 
est hour of the day. 

There were meals to be had, however, by the 
wayside : a breakfast in the morning, a dinner 
somewhere between eleven and two, and supper 
from five to eight or nine at night. We had rarely 
less than twenty minutes for each; and if we had 
not spent many another twenty minutes waiting 
for some express upon a side track among miles 
of desert, we might have taken an hour to each 
repast and arrived at San Francisco up to time. 
For haste is not the foible of an emigrant train. 
It gets through on sufferance, running the gauntlet 
among its more considerable brethren ; should 
there be a block, it is unhesitatingly sacrificed; 
and they cannot, in consequence, predict the length 
of the passage within a day or so. Civility is the 
main comfort that you miss. Equality, though 
conceived very largely in America, does not extend 
so low down as to an emigrant. Thus in all other 



38 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

trains, a warning cry of " All aboard ! " recalls 
the passengers to take their seats; but as soon as 
I was alone with emigrants, and from the Transfer 
all the way to San Francisco, I found this cere- 
mony was pretermitted; the train stole from the 
station without note of warning, and you had to 
keep an eye upon it even while you ate. The an- 
noyance is considerable, and the disrespect both 
wanton and petty. 

Many conductors, again, will hold no communi- 
cation with an emigrant. I asked a conductor one 
day at what time the train would stop for dinner; 
as he made no answer I repeated the question, 
with a like result; a third time I returned to the 
charge, and then Jack-in-office looked me coolly 
in the face for several seconds and turned osten- 
tatiously away. I believe he was half ashamed of 
his brutality; for Avhen another person made the 
same inquiry, although he still refused the infor- 
mation, he condescended to answer, and even to 
justify his reticence in a voice loud enough for 
me to hear. It was, he said, his principle not to 
tell people where they were to dine; for one 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 39 

answer led to many other questions, as what o'clock 
it was? or, how soon should we be there? and he 
could not afford to be eternally worried. 

As you are thus cut off from the superior au- 
thorities, a great deal of your comfort depends on 
the character of the newsboy. He has it in his 
power indefinitely to better and brighten the emi- 
grant's lot. The newsboy with whom we started 
from the Transfer was a dark, bullying, contempt- 
uous, insolent scoundrel, who treated us like dogs. 
Indeed, in his case, matters came nearly to a fight. 
It happened thus : he was going his rounds through 
the cars with some commodities for sale, and com- 
ing to a party who were at Scvcn-np or Cascino 
(our two games), upon a bed-board, slung down 
a cigar-box in the middle of the cards, knocking 
one man's hand to the floor. It was the last straw. 
In a moment the whole party were upon their feet, 
the cigars were upset, and he was ordered to " get 
out of that directly, or he would get more than 
he reckoned for." The fellow grumbled and mut- 
tered, but ended by making off, and was less 
openly insulting in the future. On the other hand, 



40 ACROSS THE PLAIxNS 

the lad who rode with us in this capacity from 
Ogden to Sacramento made himself the friend of 
all, and helped us with information, attention, as- 
sistance, and a kind countenance. He told us 
where and when we should have our meals, and 
how long the train would stop ; kept seats at table 
for those who were delayed, and watched that we 
should neither be left behind nor yet unnecessarily 
hurried. You, who live at home at ease, can 
hardly realise the greatness of this service, even 
had it stood alone. When I think of that lad 
coming and going, train after train, with his 
bright face and civil words, I see how easily a 
good man may become the benefactor of his kind. 
Perhaps he is discontented with himself, perhaps 
troubled with ambitions ; why, if he but knew it, 
he is a hero of the old Greek stamp ; and while 
he thinks he is only earning a profit of a few cents, 
and that perhaps exorbitant, he is doing a man's 
work and bettering the world. 

I must tell here an experience of mine with an- 
other newsboy. I tell it because it gives so good 
an example of that uncivil kindness of the Ameri- 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 41 

can, which is perhaps their most bewildering char- 
acter to one newly landed. It was immediately 
after I had left the emigrant train ; and I am told 
I looked like a man at death's door, so much had 
this long journey shaken me. I sat at the end of 
a car, and the catch being broken, and myself 
feverish and sick, I had to hold the door open with 
my foot for the sake of air. In this attitude my 
leg debarred the newsboy from his box of mer- 
chandise. I made haste to let him pass when I 
observed that he was coming; but I was busy 
with a book, and so once or twice he came upon 
me unawares. On these occasions he most rudely 
struck my foot aside ; and though I myself apol- 
ogised, as if to show him the way, he answered me 
never a word. I chafed furiously, and I fear the 
next time it would have come to words. But sud- 
denly I felt a touch upon my shoulder, and a large 
juicy pear was put into my hand. It was the news- 
boy, who had observed that I was looking ill and 
so made me this present out of a tender heart. For 
the rest of the journey I was petted like a sick 
child; he lent me newspapers, thus depriving him- 



42 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

self of his legitimate profit on their sale, and came 
repeatedly to sit by me and cheer me up. 

THE PLAINS OF NEBRASKA 

It had thundered on the Friday night, but the 
sun rose on Saturday without a cloud. We were 
at sea — there is no other adequate expression — 
on the plains of Nebraska. I made my observatory 
on the top of a fruit-waggon, and sat by the hour 
upon that perch to spy about me, and to spy in 
vain for something new. It was a world almost 
without a feature ; an empty sky, an empty earth ; 
front and back, the line of railway stretched from 
horizon to horizon, like a cue across a billiard- 
board ; on either hand, the green plain ran till it 
touched the skirts of heaven. Along the track 
innumerable wild sunflowers, no bigger than a 
crown-piece, bloomed in a continuous flower-bed; 
grazing beasts were seen upon the prairie at all 
degrees of distance and diminution ; and now and 
again we might perceive a few dots beside the rail- 
road which grew more and more distinct as we 
drew nearer till they turned into wooden cabins, 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 43 

and then dwindled and dwindled in our wake until 
they me4ted into their surroundings, and we were 
once more alone upon the billiard-board. The 
train toiled over this infinity like a snail ; and being 
the one thing moving, it was wonderful what huge 
proportions it began to assume in our regard. It 
seemed miles in length, and either end of it within 
but a step of the horizon. Even my own body or 
my own head seemed a great thing in that empti- 
ness. I note the feeling the more readily as it is 
the contrary of what I have read of in the experi- 
ence of others. Day and night, above the roar of 
the train, our ears were kept busy with the in- 
cessant chirp of grasshoppers — a noise like the 
winding up of countless clocks and watches, which 
began after awhile to seem proper to that land. 

To one hurrying through by steam there was a 
certain exhilaration in this spacious vacancy, this 
greatness of the air, this discovery of the whole 
arch of heaven, this straight, unbroken, prison-line 
of the horizon. Yet one could not but reflect upon 
the weariness of those who passed by there in old 
days, at the foot's pace of oxen, painfully urging 



44 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

their teams, and with no landmark but that unat- 
tainable evening sun for which they steefed, and 
which daily fled them by an equal stride. They 
had nothing, it would seem, to overtake; nothing 
by which to reckon their advance; no sight for 
repose or for encouragement; but stage after stage, 
only the dead green waste underfoot, and the 
mocking, fugitive horizon. But the eye, as I have 
been told, found differences even here; and at the 
worst the emigrant came, by perseverance, to the 
end of his toil. It is the settlers, after all, at whom 
we have a right to marvel. Our consciousness, by 
which we live, is itself but the creature of variety. 
Upon what food does it subsist in such a land? 
What livelihood can repay a human creature for 
a life spent in this huge sameness? He is cut off 
from books, from news, from company, from all 
that can relieve existence but the prosecution of 
his affairs. A sky full of stars is the most varied 
spectacle that he can hope. He may walk five miles 
and see nothing; ten, and it is as though he had 
not moved; twenty, and still he is in the midst 
of the same great level, and has approached no 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 45 

nearer to the one object within view, the flat 
horizon which keeps pace with his advance. We 
are full at home of the question of agreeable wall- 
papers, and wise people are of opinion that the 
temper may be quieted by sedative surroundings. 
But what is to be said of the Nebraskan settler? 
His is a wall-paper with a vengeance — one quar- 
ter of the universe laid bare in all its gauntness. 
His eye must embrace at every glance the whole 
seeming concave of the visible world ; it quails 
before so vast an outlook, it is tortured by distance ; 
yet there is no rest or shelter, till the man runs 
into his cabin, and can repose his sight upon things 
near at hand. Hence, I am told, a sickness of 
the vision peculiar to these empty plains. 

Yet perhaps with sunflowers and cicadse, sum- 
mer and winter, cattle, wife and family, the settler 
may create a full and various existence. One per- 
son at least I saw upon the plains who seemed in 
every way superior to her lot. This was a woman 
who boarded us at a way station, selling milk. She 
was largely formed ; her features were more than 
comely ; she had that great rarity — a fine com- 



46 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

plexion which became her; and her eyes were 
kind, dark, and steady. She sold milk with patri- 
archal grace. There was not a line in her coun- 
tenance, not a note in her soft and sleepy voice, 
but spoke of an entire contentment with her life. 
It would have been fatuous arrogance to pity such 
a woman. Yet the place where she lived was to 
me almost ghastly. Less than a dozen wooden 
houses, all of a shape and all nearly of a size, stood 
planted along the railway lines. Each stood apart 
in its own lot. Each opened direct off the billiard- 
board, as if it were a billiard-board indeed, and 
these only models that had been set down upon it 
ready made. Her own, into which I looked, was 
clean but very empty, and showed nothing home- 
like but the burning fire. This extreme newness, 
above all in so naked and flat a country, gives a 
strong impression of artificiality. With none of 
the litter and discolouration of human life; with 
the paths unworn, and the houses still sweating 
from the axe, such a settlement as this seems 
purely scenic. The mind is loath to accept it for 
a piece of reality; and it seems incredible that life 



' ACROSS THE PLAINS 47 

can go on with so few properties, or the great 
child, man, find entertainment in so bare a play- 
room. 

And truly it is as yet an incomplete society in 
some points ; or at least it contained, as I passed 
through, one person incompletely civilised. At 
North Platte, where we supped that evening, one 
man asked another to pass the milk- jug. This 
other was well dressed and of what we should call 
a respectable appearance; a darkish man, high 
spoken, eating as though he had some usage of 
society; but he turned upon the first speaker with 
extraordinary vehemence of tone 

" There 's a waiter here ! " he cried. 

" I only asked you to pass the milk," explained 
the first. 

Here is the retort verbatim 

" Pass ! Hell ! I 'm not paid for that business ; 
the waiter 's paid for it. You should use civility 
at table, and, by God, I '11 show you how ! " 

The other man very wisely made no answer, and 
the bully went on with his supper as though noth- 
ing had occurred. It pleases me to think that some 



48 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

day soon he will meet with one of his own kidney; 
and that perhaps both may fall. 

THE DESERT OF WYOMING 

To cross such a plain is to grow homesick for 
the mountains. I longed for the Black Hills of 
Wyoming, which I knew we were soon to enter, 
like an ice-bound whaler for the spring. Alas ! and 
it was a worse country than the other. All Sunday 
and Monday we travelled through these sad moun- 
tains, or over the main ridge of the Rockies, which 
is a fair match to them for misery of aspect. Hour 
after hour it was the same unhomely and unkindly 
w^orld about our onward path ; tumbled boulders, 
cliffs that drearily imitate the shape of monuments 
and fortifications — how drearily, how tamely, 
none can tell who has not seen them ; not a tree, 
not a patch of sward, not one shapely or com- 
manding mountain form ; sage-brush, eternal 
sage-brush; over all, the same weariful and gloomy 
colouring, greys warming into brown, greys dark- 
ening towards black ; and for sole sign of life, 
liere and there a few fleeing antelopes; here and 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 49 

there, but at incredible intervals, a creek running 
in a canon. The plains have a grandeur of their 
own ; but here there is nothing but a contorted 
smallness. Except for the air, which was light 
and stimulating, there was not one good circum- 
stance in that God-forsaken land. 

I had been suffering in my health a good deal 
all the way; and at last, Avhether I was exhausted 
by my complaint or poisoned in some wayside 
eating-house, the evening we left Laramie, I fell 
sick outright. That was a night which I shall not 
readily forget. The lamps did not go out ; each 
made a faint shining in its own neighbourhood, 
and the shadows were confounded together in the 
long, hollow box of the car. The sleepers lay in 
uneasy attitudes ; here two chums alongside, flat 
upon their backs like dead folk; there a man 
sprawling on the floor, with his face upon his arm ; 
there another half seated with his head and shoul- 
ders on the bench. The most passive were con- 
tinually and roughly shaken by the movement of 
the train ; others stirred, turned, or stretched out 
their arms like children ; it w-as surprising how 



50 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

many groaned and murmured in their sleep; and 
as I passed to and fro, stepping across the pros- 
trate, and caught now a snore, now a gasp, now a 
half-formed word, it gave me a measure of the 
worthlessness of rest in that unresting vehicle. 
Although it was chill, I was obliged to open my 
window, for the degradation of the air soon became 
intolerable to one who was awake and using the 
full supply of life. Outside, in a glimmering night, 
I saw the black, amorphous hills shoot by un- 
weariedly into our wake. They that long for 
morning have never longed for it more earnestly 
than I. 

And yet when day came, it was to shine upon 
the same broken and unsightly quarter of the 
world. Mile upon mile, and not a tree, a bird, or 
a river. Only down the long, sterile caiions, the 
train shot hooting and awoke the resting echo. 
That train was the one piece of life in all the deadly 
land ; it was the one actor, the one spectacle fit 
to be observed in this paralysis of man and nature. 
And when I think how the railroad has been 
pushed through this unwatered wilderness and 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 51 

haunt of savage tribes, and now will bear an emi- 
grant for some £12 from the Atlantic to the Golden 
Gates; how at each stage of the construction, 
roaring, impromptu cities, full of gold and lust and 
death, sprang up and then died away again, and 
are now but wayside stations in the desert ; how in 
these uncouth places pig-tailed Chinese pirates 
worked side by side with border ruffians and 
broken men from Europe, talking together in a 
mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, 
quarrelling and murdering like wolves; how the 
plumed hereditary lord of all America heard, in 
this last fastness, the scream of the " bad medicine 
waggon " charioting his foes ; and then when I go 
on to remember that all this epical turmoil was con- 
ducted by gentlemen in frock coats, and with a 
view to nothing more extraordinary than a fortune 
and a subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to me, I 
own, as if this railway were the one typical achieve- 
ment of the age in which we live, as if it brought 
together into one plot all the ends of the world and 
all the degrees of social rank, and offered to some 
great writer the busiest, the most extended, and 



52 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

the most varied subject for an enduring literary 
work. If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it be 
heroism that we require, what was Troy town to 
this ? But, alas ! it is not these things that are 
necessary — it is only Homer. 

Here also we are grateful to the train, as to some 
god who conducts us swiftly through these shades 
and by so many hidden perils. Thirst, hunger, the 
sleight and ferocity of Indians are all no more 
feared, so lightly do we skim these horrible lands ; 
as the gull, who wings safely through the hurri- 
cane and past the shark. Yet we should not be 
forgetful of these hardships of the past ; and to 
keep the balance true, since I have complained of 
the trifling discomforts of my journey, perhaps 
more than was enough, let me add an origiuill 
document. It was not written by Homer, but by 
a boy of eleven, long since dead, and is dated only 
twenty years ago. I shall punctuate, to make 
things clearer, but not change the spelling. 

"My dear sister Mary, — I am afraid you will go nearly- 
crazy when you read my letter. If Jerry" (the writer's eldest 
brother) "has not written to you before now, you will be sur- 
prised to heare that we are in California, and that poor 



ACROSS THE PLAINS ^3 

Thomas" (another brother, of fifteen) " is dead. We started 

from in July, with plenty of provisions and too yoke 

oxen. We went along very well till we got within six or 
seven hundred miles of California, when the Indians attacked 
us. We found places where they had killed the emigrants. 
We had one passenger with us, too gung, and one revolver; so 
we ran all the lead We had into bullets (and) hung the guns 
up in the wagon so that we could get at them in a minit. It 
was about two o'clock in the afternoon; droave the cattel a 
little way ; when a prairie chicken alited a little way from the 
wagon. 

"Jerry took out one of the guns to shoot it, and told Tom 
to drive the oxen. Tom and I drove the oxen, and Jerry and 
the passenger went on. Then, after a little, I left Tom and 
caught up with Jerry and the other man. Jerry stopped for 
Tom to come up ; me and the man went on and sit down by a 
little stream. In a few minutes, we heard some noise; then 
three shots (they all struck poor Tom, I suppose); then they 
gave the war hoop, and as many as twenty of the red skins 
came down upon us. The three that shot Tom was hid by 
the side of the road in the bushes. 

" I thought the Tom and Jerry were shot ; so I told the 
other man that Tom and Jerry were dead, and that we had 
better try to escape, if possible. I had no shoes on ; having 
a sore foot, I thought I would not put them on. The man 
and me run down the road, but We was soon stopt by an In- 
dian on a pony. We then turend the other way, and run up 
the side of the Mountain, and hid behind some cedar trees, 
and stayed there till dark. The Indians hunted all over after 
us, and verry close to us, so close that we could here there 
tomyhawks Jingle. At dark the man and me started on, I 



54 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

stubing my toes against sticks and stones. We traveld on all 
night ; and next morning, Just as it was getting gray, we saw 
something in the shape of a man. It layed Down in tlie grass. 
We went up to it, and it was Jerry. He thought we ware In- 
dians. You can imagine how glad he was to see me. He 
thought we was all dead but him, and we thought him and 
Tom was dead. He had the gun that he took out of the 
wagon to shoot the prairie Chicken; all he had was the load 
that was in it. 

'' We traveld on till about eight o'clock, We caught up with 
one wagon with too men with it. We had traveld with them 
before one day; we stopt and they Drove on; we knew that 
they was ahead of us, unless they had been killed to. My feet 
was so sore when we caught up with them that I had to ride ; 
I could not step. We traveld on for too days, when the men 
that owned the cattle said they would (could) not drive them 
another inch. We unyoked the oxen ; we had about seventy 
pounds of flour; we took it out and divided it into four packs. 
Each of the men took about i8 pounds apiece and a blanket. 
I carried a little bacon, dried meat, and little quilt ; I had in 
all about twelve pounds. We had one pint of flour a day for 
our alloyance. Sometimes we made soup of it; sometimes we 
(made) pancakes; and sometimes mixed it up with cold water 
and eat it that way. We traveld twelve or fourteen days. 
The time came at last when we should have to reach some 
place or starve. We saw fresh horse and cattle tracks. The 
morning come, we scraped all the flour out of the sack, mixed 
it up, and baked it into bread, and made some soup, and eat 
everything we had. We traveld on all day without anything to 
eat, and that evening we Caught up with a sheep train of eight 
wagons. We traveld with them till we arrived at the settle- 



ACROSS THE PLAINS S5 

ments ; and know I am safe in California, and got to good 
home, and going to school. 

" Jerry is working in . It is a good country. You 

can get from 50 to 60 and 75 Dollars for cooking. Tell me 
all about the affairs in the States, and how all the folks get 
along." 

And so ends this artless narrative. The Httle 
man was at school again, God bless him, while 
his brother lay scalped upon the deserts. 

FELLOW-PASSENGERS 

At Ogden we changed cars from the Union 
Pacific to the Central Pacific line of railroad. The 
change was doubly welcome; for, first, we had 
better cars on the new line ; and, second, those in 
which we had been cooped for more than ninety 
hours had begun to stink abominably. Several 
3^ards away, as we returned, let us say from din- 
ner, our nostrils w^ere assailed by rancid air. I 
have stood on a platform while the whole train 
was shunting ; and as the dwelling-cars drew near, 
there would come a whiff of pure menagerie, only 
a little sourer, as from men instead of monkeys. 
I think we are human only in virtue of open 



S6 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

windows. Without fresh air, yon only require a bad 
heart, and a remarkable command of the Queen's 
English, to become such another as Dean Swift; 
a kind of leering, human goat, leaping and wag- 
ging your scut on mountains of offence. I do my 
best to keep my head the other way, and look for 
the human rather than the bestial in this Yahoo- 
like business of the emigrant train. But one thing 
I must say, the car of the Chinese was notably the 
least offensive. 

The cars on the Central Pacific were nearly twice 
as high, and so proportionally airier; they were 
freshly varnished, which gave us all a sense of 
cleanliness as though we had bathed; the seats 
drew out and joined in the centre, so that there 
was no more need for bed-boards ; and there was 
an upper tier of berths which could be closed by 
day and opened at night. 

I had by this time some opportunity of seeing 
the people whom I was among. They were in 
rather marked contrast to the emigrants I had met 
on board ship while crossing the Atlantic. They 
were mostly lumpish fellows, silent and noisy, a 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 57 

common combination ; somewhat sad, I should say, 
with an extraordinary poor taste in humour, and 
httle interest in their fellow-creatures beyond that 
of a cheap and merely external curiosity. If they 
heard a man's name and business, they seemed to 
think they had the heart of that mystery; but 
they were as eager to know that much as they 
were indifferent to the rest. Some of them were 
on nettles till they learned your name was Dick- 
son and you a journeyman baker ; but beyond that, 
whether you were Catholic or Mormon, dull or 
clever, fierce or friendly, was all one to them. 
Others who were not so stupid, gossiped a little, 
and, I am bound to say, unkindly. A favourite 
witticism was for some lout to raise the alarm of 
" All aboard ! " while the rest of us were dining, 
thus contributing his mite to the general discom- 
fort. Such a one was always much applauded for 
his high spirits. When I was ill coming through 
Wyoming, I was astonished — fresh from the 
eager humanity on board ship — to meet with little 
but laughter. One of the young men even amused 
himself by incommoding me, as was then very 



58 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

easy; and that not from ill-nature, but mere clod- 
like incapacity to think, for he expected me to join 
the laugh. I did so, but it was phantom merri- 
ment. Later on, a man from Kansas had three 
violent epileptic fits, and though, of course, there 
were not wanting some to help him, it was rather 
superstitious terror than sympathy that his case 
evoked among his fellow-passengers. " Oh, I hope 
he 's not going to die ! '' cried a woman; " it would 
be terrible to have a dead body ! " And there was 
a very general movement to leave the man behind 
at the next station. This, by good fortune, the 
conductor negatived. 

There was a good deal of story-telling in some 
quarters ; in others, little but silence. Li this 
society, more than any other that ever I was in, 
it was the narrator alone who seemed to enjoy the 
narrative. It was rarely that any one listened for 
the listening. If he lent an ear to another man's 
story, it was because he was in immediate want 
of a hearer for one of his own. Food and the 
progress of the train were the subjects most gen- 
erally treated; many joined to discuss these who 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 59 

otherwise would hold their tongues. One small 
knot had no better occupation than to worm out 
of me my name; and the more they tried, the 
more obstinately fixed I grew to baffle them. They 
assailed me with artful questions and insidious 
offers of correspondence in the future; but I was 
perpetually on my guard, and parried their as- 
saults with inward laughter. I am sure Dubuque 
would have given me ten dollars for the secret. 
He owed me far more, had he understood life, 
for thus preserving him a lively interest through- 
out the journey. I met one of my fellow-passen- 
gers months after, driving a street tramway car 
in San Francisco; and, as the joke was ;iow out 
of season, told him my name without subterfuge. 
You never saw a man more chopfallen. But had 
my name been Demogorgon, after so prolonged a 
mystery he had still been disappointed. 

There were no emigrants direct from Europe — 
save one German family and a knot of Cornish 
miners who kept grimly by themselves, one read- ' 
ing the New Testament all day long through steel 
spectacles, the rest discussing privately the secrets 



6o ACROSS THE PLAINS 

of their old-world, mysterious race. Lady Hester 
Stanhope believed she could make something great 
of the Cornish; for my part, I can make nothing 
of them at all. A division of races, older and 
more original than that of Babel, keeps this close, 
esoteric family apart from neighbouring English- 
men. Not even a Red Indian seems more foreign 
in my eyes. This is one of the lessons of travel 
— that some of the strangest races dwell next door 
to you at home. 

The rest were all American born, but they came 
from almost every quarter of that continent. All 
the States of the North had sent out a fugitive to 
cross the plains with me. From Virginia, from 
Pennsylvania, from New York, from far western 
Iowa and Kansas, from Maine that borders on 
the Canadas, and from the Canadas themselves — 
some one or two were fleeing in quest of a better 
land and better wages. The talk in the train, like 
the talk I heard on the steamer, ran upon hard 
times, short commons, and hope that moves ever 
westward. I thought of my shipful from Great 
Britain with a feeling of despair. They had come 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 6i 

3000 miles, and yet not far enough. Hard times 
bowed them out of the Clyde, and stood to wel- 
come them at Sandy Hook. Where were they to 
go? Pennsylvania, Maine, Iowa, Kansas? These 
were not places for immigration, but for emigra- 
tion, it appeared ; not one of them, but I knew a 
man who had lifted up his heel and left it for an 
ungrateful country. And it was still westward 
that they ran. Hunger, you would have thought, 
came out of the east like the sun, and the evening 
was made of edible gold. And, meantime, in the 
car in front of me, were there not half a hundred 
emigrants from the opposite quarter? Hungry 
Europe and hungry China, each pouring from their 
gates in search of provender, had here come face 
to face. The two waves had met; east and west 
had alike failed; the whole round world had been 
prospected and condemned ; there was no El Do- 
rado anywhere; and till one could emigrate to the 
moon, it seemed as well to stay patiently at home. 
Nor was there wanting another sign, at once more 
picturesque and more disheartening; for, as we 
continued to steam westward toward the land of 



62 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

gold, we were continually passing other emigrant 
trains upon the journey east; and these were as 
crowded as our own. Had all these return voy- 
agers made a fortune in the mines? Were they 
all bound for Paris, and to be in Rome by Easter? 
It would seem not, for, whenever we met them, 
the passengers ran on the platform and cried to 
us through the windows, in a kind of wailing 
chorus, to " Come back." On the plains of Ne- 
braska, in the mountains of Wyoming, it was still 
the same cry, and dismal to my heart, " Come 
back ! " That was what we heard by the way 
" about the good country we were going to." 
And at that very hour the Sand-lot of San Fran- 
cisco was crowded with the unemployed, and the 
echo from the other side of Market Street was 
repeating the rant of demagogues. 

If, in truth, it were only for the sake of wages 
that men emigrate, how many thousands would 
regret the bargain ! But wages, indeed, are only 
one consideration out of many ; for we are a 
race of gipsies, and love change and travel for 
themselves. 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 61, 

DESPISED RACES 

Of all stupid ill-feelings, the sentiment of my 
fellow-Caucasians towards our companions in the 
Chinese car was the most stupid and the w^orst. 
They seemed never to have looked at them, lis- 
tened to them, or thought of them, but hated them 
a priori. The Mongols were their enemies in that 
cruel and treacherous battlefield of money. They 
could work better and cheaper in half a hundred 
industries, and hence there was no calumny too idle 
for the Caucasians to repeat, and even to believe. 
They declared them hideous vermin, and affected 
a kind of choking in the throat when they beheld 
them. Now, as a matter of fact, the young Chinese 
man is so like a large class of European women, 
that on raising my head and suddenly catching 
sight of one at a considerable distance, I have for 
an instant been deceived by the resemblance. I do 
not say it is the most attractive class of our women^ 
but for all that many a man's wife is less pleasantly 
favoured. Again, my emigrants declared that the 
Chinese were dirty. I cannot say they were clean, 



64 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

for that was impossible upon the journey; but in 
their efforts after cleanhness they put the rest of 
us to shame. We all pigged and stewed in one 
infamy, wet our hands and faces for half a minute 
daily on the platform, and were unashamed. But 
the Chinese never lost an opportunity, and you 
would see them washing their feet — an act not 
dreamed of among ourselves — and going as far 
as decency permitted to wash their whole bodies. 
I may remark by the way that the dirtier people 
are in their persons the more delicate is their sense 
of modesty. A clean man strips in a crowded 
boathouse ; but he who is unwashed slinks in and 
out of bed without uncovering an inch of skin. 
Lastly, these very foul and malodorous Caucasians 
entertained the surprising illusion that it was the 
Chinese waggon, and that alone, which stank. I 
have said already that it was the exception, and 
notably the freshest of the three. 

These judgments are typical of the feeling in all 
Western America. The Chinese are considered 
stupid, because they are imperfectly acquainted 
with English. They are held to be base, because 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 6s 

their dexterity and frugality enable them to under- 
bid the lazy, luxurious Caucasian. They are said 
to be thieves ; I am sure they have no monopoly 
of that. They are called cruel; the Anglo-Saxon 
and the cheerful Irishman may each reflect before 
he bears the accusation. I am told, again, that 
they are of the race of river pirates, and belong to 
the most despised and dangerous class in the Celes- 
tial Empire. But if this be so, what remarkable 
pirates have we here ! and what must be the virtues, 
the industry, the education, and the intelligence of 
their superiors at home! 

Awhile ago it was the Irish, now it is the Chinese 
that must go. Such is the cry. It seems, after all, 
that no country is bound to submit to immigration 
any more than to invasion : each is war to the 
knife, and resistance to either but legitimate de- 
fence. Yet we may regret the free tradition of 
the republic, which loved to depict herself with 
open arms, welcoming all unfortunates. And cer- 
tainly, as a man who believes that he loves free- 
dom, I may be excused some bitterness when I 

find her sacred name misused in the contention. 

5 



66 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

It was but the other day that I heard a vulgar 
fellow in the Sand-lot, the popular tribune of San 
Francisco, roaring for arms and butchery. " At 
the call of Abreham Lincoln," said the orator, " ye 
rose in the name of freedom to set free the negroes ; 
can ye not rise and liberate yourselves from a few 
dhirty Mongolians ? " 

For my own part, I could not look but with 
wonder and respect on the Chinese. Their fore- 
fathers watched the stars before mine had begun 
to keep pigs. Gunpowder and printing, which 
the other day we imitated, and a school of manners 
which we never had the delicacy so much as to 
desire to imitate, were theirs in a long-past an- 
tiquity. They walk the earth with us, but it 
seems they must be of different clay. They hear 
the clock strike the same hour, yet surely of a 
different epoch. They travel by steam conveyance, 
yet with such a baggage of old Asiatic thoughts 
and superstitions as might check the locomotive in 
its course. Whatever is thought within the circuit 
of the Great Wall ; what the wry-eyed, spectacled 
schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round Pekin ; 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 67 

religions so old that our language looks a halfling 
boy alongside; philosophy so wise that our best 
philosophers find things therein to wonder at; all 
this travelled alongside of me for thousands of 
miles over plain and mountain. Heaven knows if 
we had one common thought or fancy all that way, 
or whether our eyes, which yet were formed upon 
the same design, beheld the same world out of the 
railway windows. And when either of us turned 
his thoughts to home and childhood, wdiat a 
strange dissimilarity must there not have been in 
these pictures of the mind — when I beheld that 
old, grey, castled city, high throned above the iirth, 
W'ith the flag of Britain flying, and the red-coat 
sentry pacing over all ; and the man in the next 
car to me would conjure up some junks and a 
pagoda and a fort of porcelain, and call it, wath 
the same affection, home. 

Another race shared among m)^ fellow-passen- 
gers in the disfavour of the Chinese; and that, it 
is hardly necessary to say, was the noble red man 
of old story — he over whose own hereditary con- 
tinent w^e had been steaming all these days. I saw 



68 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

no wild or independent Indian ; indeed, I hear that 
such avoid the neighbourhood of the train ; but 
now and again at way stations, a husband and wife 
and a few children, disgracefully dressed out with 
the sweepings of civilisation, came forth and stared 
upon the emigrants. The silent stoicism of their 
conduct, and the pathetic degradation of their ap- 
pearance, would have touched any thinking crea- 
ture, but my fellow-passengers danced and jested 
round them with a truly Cockney baseness. I was 
ashamed for the thing we call civilisation. We 
should carry upon our consciences so much, at 
least, of our forefathers' misconduct as we con- 
tinue to profit by ourselves. 

If oppression drives a wise man mad, what 
should be raging in the hearts of these poor tribes, 
who have been driven back and back, step after 
step, their promised reservations torn from them 
one after another as the States extended westward, 
until at length they are shut up into these hideous 
mountain deserts of the centre — and even there 
find themselves invaded, insulted, and hunted out 
by ruffianly diggers? The eviction of the Chero- 



ACROSS THE PLAINS e() 

kees (to name but an instance), the extortion of 
Indian agents, the outrages of the wicked, the ill- 
faith of all, nay, down to the ridicule of such poor 
beings as were here with me upon the train, make 
up a chapter of injustice and indignity such as a 
man must be in some ways base if his heart will 
suffer him to pardon or forget. These old, well- 
founded, historical hatreds have a savour of no- 
bility for the independent. That the Jew should 
not love the Christian, nor the Irishman love the 
English, nor the Indian brave tolerate the thought 
of the American, is not disgraceful to the nature 
of man; rather, indeed, honourable, since it de- 
pends on wrongs ancient like the race, and not 
personal to him who cherishes the indignation. 

TO THE GOLDEN GATES 

A LITTLE corner of Utah. is soon traversed, and 
leaves no particular impressions on the mind. By 
an early hour on Wednesday morning we stopped 
to breakfast at Toano, a little station on a bleak, 
high-lying plateau in Nevada. The man who kept 
the station eating-house was a Scot, and learning 



70 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

that I was the same, he grew very friendly, and 
gave me some advice on the country I was now 
entering. " You see," said he, '' I tell you this, 
because I come from your country." Hail, brither 
Scots ! 

His most important hint was on the moneys of 
this part of the world. There is something in the 
simplicity of a decimal coinage which is revolting 
to the human mind ; thus the French, in small 
affairs, reckon strictly by halfpence ; and you have 
to solve, by a spasm of mental arithmetic, such 
posers as thirty-two, forty-five, or even a hundred 
halfpence. In the Pacific States they have made 
a bolder push for complexity, and settle their 
affairs by a coin that no longer exists — the bit, 
or old Mexican real. The supposed value of the 
bit is twelve and a half cents, eight to the dollar. 
When it comes to two bits, the quarter-dollar 
stands for the required amount. But how about an 
odd bit? The nearest coin to it is a dime, which 
is short by a fifth. That, then, is called a short bit. 
If you have one, you lay it triumphantly down, 
and save two and a half cents. But if you have 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 71 

not, and lay down a quarter, the bar-keeper or 
shopman calmly tenders you a dime by way of 
change; and thus you have paid what is called a 
long hit, and lost two and a half cents, or even, 
by comparison with a short bit, five cents. In 
country places all over the Pacific coast, nothing 
lower than a bit is ever asked or taken, which 
vastly increases the cost of life; as even for a 
glass of beer you must pay fivepence or sevenpence- 
half penny, as the case may be. You w^oulcl say 
that this system of mutual robbery was as broad 
as it was long; but I have discovered a plan to 
make it broader, with which I here endow the 
public. It is brief and simple — radiantly simple. 
There is one place where five cents are recognised, 
and that is the post-ofiice. A quarter is only worth 
two bits, a short and a long. Whenever you have 
a quarter, go to the post-office and buy five cents' 
worth of postage-stamps ; you will receive in 
change two dimes, that is, two short bits. The 
purchasing power of your money is undimin- 
ished. You can go and have your two glasses 
of beer all the same ; and you have made your- 



72 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

self a present of live cents' worth of postage- 
stamps into the bargain. Benjamin Frankhn 
would have patted me on the head for this 
discovery. 

From Toano we travelled all day through 
deserts of alkali and sand, horrible to man, and 
bare sage-brush country that seemed little kindlier, 
and came by supper-time to Elko. As we were 
standing, after our manner, outside the station, 
I saw two men whip suddenly from underneath 
the cars, and take to their heels across country. 
They were tramps, it appeared, who had been 
riding on the beams since eleven of the night 
before; and several of my fellow-passengers had 
already seen and conversed with them while we 
broke our fast at Toano. These land stowaways 
play a great part over here in America, and I 
should have liked dearly to become acquainted 
with them. 

At Elko an odd circumstance befell me. I was 
coming out from supper, when I was stopped by 
a small, stout, ruddy man, followed by two others 
taller and ruddier than himself. 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 73 

" Ex-cuse me, sir," he said, " but do you happen 
to be going on ? " 

I said I was, whereupon he said he hoped to 
persuade me to desist from that intention. He 
had a situation to offer «me, and if we could come 
to terms, why, good and wxll. '' You see," he con- 
tinued, " I 'm running a theatre here, and we 're 
a httle short in the orchestra. You 're a musi- 
cian, I guess ? " 

I assured him that, beyond a rudimentary ac- 
cjuaintance with '' Auld Lang Syne " and '' The 
Wearing of the Green," I had no pretension what- 
ever to that style. He seemed much put out of 
countenance; and one of his taller companions 
asked him, on the nail, for five dollars. 

" You see, sir," added the latter to me, '' he bet 
you were a musician ; I bet you were n't. No 
offence, I hope? " 

" None whatever," I said, and the two with- 
drew to the bar, wdiere I presume the debt was 
liquidated. 

This little adventure woke bright hopes in my 
fellow-travellers, who thought they had now come 



74 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

to a country where situations went a-begging. But 
I am not so sure that the offer was in good faith. 
Indeed, I am more than half persuaded it was but 
a feeler to decide the bet. 

Of all the next day I will tell you nothing, for 
the best of all reasons, that I remember no more 
than that we continued through desolate and desert 
scenes, fiery hot and deadly weary. But some time 
after I had fallen asleep that night, I was awak- 
ened by one of my companions. It was in vain 
that I resisted. A fire of enthusiasm and whisky 
burned in his eyes; and he declared we were in a 
new country, and I must come forth upon the plat- 
form and see with my own eyes. The train was 
then, in its patient way, standing halted in a by- 
track. It was a clear, moonlit night ; but the 
valley was too narrow to admit the moonshine 
direct, and only a diffused glimmer whitened the 
tall rocks and relieved the blackness of the pines. 
A hoarse clamour filled the air ; it was the con- 
tinuous plunge of a cascade somewhere near at 
hand among the mountains. The air struck chill, 
but tasted good and vigorous in the nostrils — a 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 75 

fine, dry, old mountain atmosphere. I was dead 
sleepy, but I returned to roost with a grateful 
mountain feeling at my heart. 

When I awoke next morning, I was puzzled for 
awhile to know if it were day or night, for the 
illumination was unusual. I sat up at last, and 
found we were grading slowly downward through 
a long snowshed; and suddenly we shot into an 
open ; and before we were swallowed into the next 
length of wooden tunnel, I had one glimpse of a 
huge pine-forested ravine upon my left, a foaming 
river, and a sky already coloured with the fires of 
dawn. I am usually very calm over the displays 
of nature ; but you will scarce believe how my heart 
leaped at this. It was like meeting one's wife. I 
had come home again — home from unsightly 
deserts to the green and habitable corners of the 
earth. Every spire of pine along the hill-top, every 
trouty pool along that mountain river, was more 
dear to me than a blood relation. Few people 
have praised God more happily than I did. And 
thenceforward, down by Blue Cafion, Alta, Dutch 
Flat, and all the old mining camps, through a sea 



76 ACROSS THE PLAINS 

of mountain forests, dropping thousands of fcst 
toward the far sea-level as we went, not I only, 
but all the passengers on board, threw off their 
sense of dirt and heat and weariness, and bawled 
like schoolboys, and thronged with shining eyes 
upon the platform and became new creatures 
within and without. The sun no longer oppressed 
us with heat, it only shone laughingly along the 
mountain-side, until we were fain to laugh our- 
selves for glee. At every turn we could see farther 
into the land and our own happy futures. At 
every town the cocks were tossing their clear notes 
into the golden air, and crowing for the new day 
and the new country. For this was indeed our 
destination; this was " the good country " w^e had 
been going to so long. 

By afternoon w^e were at Sacramento, the city 
of gardens in a plain of corn ; and the next day 
before the dawn w^e were lying to upon the Oak- 
land side of San Francisco Bay. The day was 
breaking as we crossed the ferry; the fog was 
rising over the citied hills of San Francisco; the 
bay was perfect — not a ripple, scarce a stain, 



ACROSS THE PLAINS 77 

upon its blue expanse; everything was waiting, 
breathless, for the sun. A spot of cloudy gold lit 
first upon the head of Tamalpais, and then widened 
downward on its shapely shoulder; the air seemed 
to awaken, and began to sparkle ; and suddenly 

" The tall hills Titan discovered," 

and the city of San Francisco, and the bay of gold 

and corn, were lit from end to end with summer 

daylight. 

[1879.] 



THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 

THE WOODS AND THE PACIFIC 

TFIE Bay of Monterey has been compared 
by no less a person than General Sher- 
man to a bent fishing-hook ; and the com- 
parison, if less important than the march through 
Georgia, still shows the eye of a soldier for topog- 
raphy. Santa Cruz sits exposed at the shank ; the 
mouth of the Salinas River is at the middle of the 
bend ; and Monterey itself is cosily ensconced 
beside the barb. Thus the ancient capital of Cali- 
fornia faces across the bay, while the Pacific Ocean, 
though hidden by low hills and forests, bombards 
her left flank and rear with never-dying surf. In 
front of the town, the long line of sea-beach trends 
north and northwest, and then westward to enclose 
the bay. The waves which lap so quietly about the 
jetties of Monterey grow louder and larger in the 
distance; you can see the breakers leaping high 



OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 79 

and white by day; at night, the outhne of the 
shore is traced in transparent silver by the moon- 
hght and the flying foam; and from all round, 
even in quiet weather, the low, distant, thrilling 
roar of the Pacific hangs over the coast and the 
adjacent country like smoke above a battle. 

These long beaches are enticing to the idle man. 
It would be hard to find a walk more solitary, 
and at the same time more exciting to the mind. 
Crowds of ducks and sea-gulls hover over the sea. 
Sandpipers trot in and out by troops after the re- 
tiring waves, trilling together in a chorus of infini- 
tesimal song. Strange sea-tangles, new to the 
European eye, the bones of whales, or sometimes 
a whole whale's carcase, white with carrion-gulls 
and poisoning the wind, lie scattered here and there 
along the sands. The waves come in slowly, vast 
and green, curve their translucent necks, and burst 
with a surprising uproar, that runs, waxing and 
waning, up and down the long key-board of the 
beach. The foam of these great ruins mounts in 
an instant to the ridge of the sand glacis, swiftly 
fleets back again, and is met and buried by the next 



8o OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 

breaker. The interest is perpetually fresh. On 
no other coast that I know shall you enjoy, in 
calm, sunny weather, such a spectacle of Ocean's 
greatness, such beauty of changing colour, or 
such degrees of thunder in the sound. The very 
air is more than usually salt by this Homeric 
deep. 

Inshore, a tract of sand-hills borders on the 
beach. Here and there a lagoon, more or less 
brackish, attracts the birds and hunters. A rough, 
spotty undergrowth partially conceals the sand. 
The crouching, hardy live-oaks flourish singly or 
in thickets — the kind of wood for murderers to 
crawl among — and here and there the skirts of 
the forest extend downward from the hills with a 
floor of turf and long aisles of pine-trees hung 
with Spaniard's Beard. Through this quaint des- 
ert the railway cars drew near to Monterey from 
the junction at Salinas City — though that and so 
many other things are now for ever altered — and 
it was from here that you had the first view of 
the old township lying in the sands, its white wind- 
mills bickering in the chill, perpetual wind, and the 



OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 8i 

first fogs of the evening drawing drearily around 
it from the sea. 

The one common note of all this country is the 
haunting presence of the ocean. A great faint 
sound of breakers follows you high up into the 
inland canons; the roar of water dwells in the 
clean, empty rooms of Monterey as in a shell upon 
the chimney; go w^here you will, you have but to 
pause and listen to hear the voice of the Pacific. 
You pass out of the town to the southwest, and 
mount the hill among pine woods. Glade, thicket, 
and grove surround you. You follow winding 
sandy tracks that lead nowhither. You see a deer ; 
a multitude of quail arises. But the sound of the 
sea still follows you as you advance, like that of 
wind among the trees, only harsher and stranger 
to the ear; and when at length you gain the sum- 
mit, out breaks on every hand and with freshened 
vigour, that same unending, distant, whispering 
rumble of the ocean ; for now you are on the top of 
Monterey peninsula, and the noise no longer only 
mounts to you from behind along the beach 

towards Santa Cruz, but from your right also, 

6 



82 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 

round by Chinatown and Pinos lighthouse, and 
from down before you to the mouth of the Car- 
mello River. The whole woodland is begirt w^ith 
thundering surges. The silence that immediately 
surrounds you where you stand is not so much 
broken as it is haunted by this distant, circling 
rumour. It sets your senses upon edge ; you strain 
your attention ; you are clearly and unusually con- 
scious of small sounds near at hand; you walk 
listening like an Indian hunter; and that voice of 
the Pacific is a sort of disquieting company to you 
in your walk. 

When once I was in these woods I found it 
difficult to turn homeward. All woods lure a 
rambler onward; but in those of Monterey it was 
the surf that particularly invited me to prolong my 
walks. I would push straight for the shore where 
I thought it to be nearest. Indeed, there was 
scarce a direction that would not, sooner or later, 
have brought me forth on the Pacific. The empti- 
ness of the woods gave me a sense of freedom and 
discovery in these excursions. I never in all my 
visits met but one man. He was a Mexican, very 



OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 83 

dark of hue, but smiling and fat, and he carried 
an axe, though his true business at that moment 
was to seek for straying cattle. I asked him what 
o'clock it was, but he seemed neither to know nor 
care ; and when he in his turn asked me for 
news of his cattle, I showed myself equally indif- 
ferent. We stood and smiled upon each other for 
a few seconds, and then turned without a word 
and took our several w^ays across the forest. 

One day — I shall never forget it — I had taken 
a trail that was new to me. After awhile the 
woods began to open, the sea to sound nearer 
hand. I came upon a road, and, to my surprise, a 
stile. A step or two farther, and, without leaving 
the woods, I found myself among trim houses. I 
walked through street after street, parallel and at 
right angles, paved with sward and dotted with 
trees, but still undeniable streets, and each with its 
name posted at the corner, as in a real town. 
Facing down the main thoroughfare — " Central 
Avenue," as it was ticketed — I saw an open-air 
temple, with benches and sounding-board, as 
though for an orchestra. The houses were all 



84 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 

tightly sliuttered; there was no smoke, no sound 
but of the waves, no moving thing. I have never 
be^n in any place that seemed so dreamlike. Pom- 
peii is all in a bustle with visitors, and its antiquity 
and strangeness deceive the imagination ; but this 
town had plainly not been built above a year or 
two, and perhaps had been deserted over-night. 
Indeed, it was not so much like a deserted town as 
like a scene upon the stage by daylight, and with 
no one on the boards. The barking of a dog led 
me at last to the only house still occupied, where 
a Scotch pastor and his wife pass the winter alone 
in this empty theatre. The place was " The Pacific 
Camp Grounds, the Christian Seaside Resort." 
Thither, in the warm season, crowds come to enjoy 
a life of teetotalism, religion, and flirtation, which 
I am willing to think blameless and agreeable. The 
neighbourhood at least is well selected. The Pa- 
cific booms in front. Westward is Point Pinos, 
with the lighthouse in a wilderness of sand, where 
you will find the lightkeeper playing the piano, 
making models and bows and arrows, studying 
dawn and sunrise in amateur oil-painting, and with 



OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 85 

a dozen other elegant pursuits and interests to sur- 
prise his brave, old-country rivals. To the east, 
and still nearer, you will come upon a space of open 
down, a hamlet, a haven among rocks, a world of 
surge and screaming sea-gulls. Such scenes are 
very similar in different climates; they appear 
homely to the eyes of all ; to me this was like a 
dozen spots in Scotland. And yet the boats that 
ride in the haven are of strange outlandish design ; 
and, if you walk into the hamlet, you will behold 
costumes and faces and hear a tongue that are 
unfamiliar to the memory. The joss-stick burns, 
the opium pipe is smoked, the floors are strewn 
with slips of coloured paper — prayers, you would 
say, that had somehow missed their destination — 
and a man guiding his upright pencil from right 
to left across the sheet, writes home the news of 
Monterey to the Celestial Empire. 

The woods and the Pacific rule between them the 
climate of this seaboard region. On the streets of 
Monterey, when the air does not smell salt from the 
one, it will be blowing perfumed from the resinous 
treetops of the other. For days together a hot. 



86 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 

dry air will overhang the town, close as from an 
oven, yet healthful and aromatic in the nostrils. 
The cause is not far to seek, for the woods are 
afire, and the hot wind is blowing from the hills. 
These fires are one of the great dangers of Cali- 
fornia. I have seen from AI outer ey as many as 
three at the same time, by day a cloud of smoke, 
by night a red coal of conflagration in the distance. 
A little thing will start them, and, if the wind be 
favourable, they gallop over miles of country faster 
than a horse. The inhabitants must turn out and 
work like demons, for it is not only the pleasant 
groves that are destroyed ; the climate and the soil 
are equally at stake, and these fires prevent the 
rains of the next winter and dry up perennial foun- 
tains. California has been a land of promise in 
its time, like Palestine; but if the woods continue 
so swiftly to perish, it may become, like Palestine, 
a land of desolation. 

To visit the w^oods while they are languidly 
burning is a strange piece of experience. The fire 
passes through the underbrush at a run. Every 
here and there a tree flares up instantaneously 



OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 87 

from root to summit, scattering tufts of flame, and 
is quenched, it seems, as quickly. But this last is 
only in semblance. For after this first squib-like 
conflagration of the dry moss and twigs, there 
remains behind a deep-rooted and consuming fire 
in the very entrails of the tree. The resin of the 
pitch-pine is principally condensed at the base of 
the bole and in the spreading roots. Thus, after 
the light, showy, skirmishing flames, w^iich are 
only as the match to the explosion, have already 
scampered down the wind into the distance, the 
true harm is but beginning for this giant of the 
woods. You may approach the tree from one side, 
and see it, scorched indeed from top to bottom, 
but apparently survivor of the peril. Make the cir- 
cuit, and there, on the other side of the column, 
is a clear mass of living coal, spreading like an 
ulcer; while underground, to their most extended 
fibre, the roots are being eaten out by fire, and the 
smoke is rising through the fissures to the surface. 
A little while, and, without a nod of warning, the 
huge pine-tree snaps off short across the ground 
and falls prostrate with a crash. Meanwhile the 



88 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 

fire continues its silent business; the roots are 
reduced to a fine ash ; and long afterwards, if you 
pass by, you will find the earth pierced with radi- 
ating galleries, and preserving the design of all 
these subterranean spurs, as though it were the 
mould for a new tree instead of the print of an old 
one. These pitch-pines of Monterey are, with the 
single exception of the Monterey cypress, the most 
fantastic of forest trees. No words can give an 
idea of the contortion of their growth; they might 
figure without change in a circle of the nether hell 
as Dante pictured it ; and at the rate at which trees 
grow, and at which forest fires spring up and 
gallop through the hills of California, we may look 
forward to a time when there will not be one of 
them left standing in that land of their nativity. 
At least they have not so much to fear from the 
axe, but perish by what may be called a natural 
although a violent death ; while it is man in his 
short-sighted greed that robs the country of the 
nobler red-wood. Yet a little while and perhaps 
all the hills of sea-board California may be as bald 
as Tamalpais. 



OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 89 

I have an interest of my own in these forest 
fires, for I came so near to lynching on one occa- 
sion, that a braver man might have retained a thrill 
from the experience. I wished to be certain 
whether it was the moss, that quaint funereal orna- 
ment of Calif ornian forests, which blazed up so 
rapidly when the flame first touched the tree. I 
suppose I must have been under the influence of 
Satan, for instead of plucking off a piece for my 
experiment, what should I do but walk up to a 
great pine-tree in a portion of the wood which had 
escaped so much as scorching, strike a match, and 
apply the flame gingerly to one of the tassels. The 
tree went off simply like a rocket; in three seconds 
it was a roaring pillar of fire. Close by I could 
hear the shouts of those who were at work com- 
bating the original conflagration. I could see the 
waggon that had brought them tied to a live-oak 
in a piece of open; I could even catch the flash of 
an axe as it swung up through the underwood into 
the sunlight. Had any one observed the result of 
my experiment my neck was literally not worth a 
pinch of snuff; after a few minutes of passionate 



90 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 

expostulation I should have been run up to a 
convenient bough. 

To die for faction is a common evil; 

But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil. 

I have run repeatedly, but never as I ran that day. 
At night I went out of town, and there was my 
own particular fire, quite distinct from the other, 
and burning as I thought with even greater vigour. 
But it is the Pacific that exercises the most direct 
and obvious power upon the climate. At sunset, 
for months together, vast, wet, melancholy fogs 
arise and come shoreward from the ocean. From 
the hill-top above Monterey the scene is often 
noble, although it is always sad. The upper air is 
still bright with sunlight; a glow still rests upon 
the Gabelano Peak ; but the fogs are in possession 
of the lower levels ; they crawl in scarves among 
the sand-hills ; they float, a little higher, in clouds 
of a gigantic size and often of a wild configuration ; 
to the south, where they have struck the seaward 
shoulder of the mountains of Santa Lucia, they 
double back and spire up skyward like smoke. 
Where their shadow touches, colour dies out of the 



OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 91 

world. The air grows chill and deadly as they 
advance. The trade-wind freshens, the trees begin 
to sigh, and all the windmills in Monterey are 
whirling and creaking and filling their cisterns 
wath the brackish water of the sands. It takes but 
a little while till the invasion is complete. The sea, 
in its lighter order, has submerged the earth. 
Monterey is curtained in for the night in thick, wet, 
salt, and frigid clouds, so to remain till day re- 
turns ; and before the sun's rays they slowly dis- 
perse and retreat in broken squadrons to the bosom 
of the sea. And yet often when the fog is thickest 
and most chill, a few steps out of the town and up 
the slope, the night will be dry and warm and full 
of inland perfume. 

MEXICANS, AMERICANS, AND INDIANS 

The history of Monterey has yet to be written. 
Founded by Catholic missionaries, a place of wise 
beneficence to Indians, a place of arms, a Mexican 
capital continually wrested by one faction from 
another, an American capital when the first House 
of Representatives held its deliberations, and then 



92 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 

falling lower and lower from the capital of the 
State to the capital of a county, and from that 
again, by the loss of its charter and town lands, to 
a mere bankrupt village, its rise and decline is 
typical of that of all Mexican institutions and 
even Mexican families in California. 

Nothing is stranger in that strange State than 
the rapidity with which the soil has changed hands. 
The Mexicans, you may say, are all poor and land- 
less, like their former capital ; and yet both it and 
they hold themselves apart and preserve their 
ancient customs and something of their ancient 
air. 

The town, when I was there, was a place of two 
or three streets, economically paved with sea-sand, 
and two or three lanes, which were watercourses 
in the rainy season, and were, at all times, rent up 
by lissures four or five feet deep. There were no 
street lights. Short sections of wooden sidewalk 
only added to the dangers of the night, for they 
were often high above the level of the roadway, 
and no one could tell where they would be likely 
to begin or end. The houses were, for the most 



OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 93 

part, built of unbaked adobe brick, many of them 
old for so new a country, some of very elegant 
proportions, with low, spacious, shapely rooms, 
and walls so thick that the heat of summer never 
dried them to the heart. At the approach of the 
rainy season a deathly chill and a graveyard smell 
began to hang about the lower floors ; and diseases 
of the chest are common and fatal among house- 
keeping people of either sex. 

There was no activity but in and around the 
saloons, where people sat almost all day long play- 
ing cards. The smallest excursion was made on 
horseback. You would scarcely ever see the main 
street without a horse or two tied to posts, and 
making a line figure with their Mexican housings. 
It struck me oddly to come across some of the 
Conihill illustrations to Mr. Blackmore's Ercma, 
and see all the characters astride on English sad- 
dles. As a matter of fact, an English saddle is 
a rarity even in San Francisco, and, you may say, 
a thing unknown in all the rest of California. In 
a place so exclusively Mexican as Monterey, you 
saw not only Mexican saddles but true Vaquero 



94 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 

riding — men always at the hand-gallop up hill 
and down dale, and round the sharpest corner, 
urging their horses with cries and gesticulations 
and cruel rotatory spurs, checking them dead with 
a touch, or wheeling them right-about-face in a 
square yard. The type of face and character of 
bearing are surprisingly un-American. The first 
ranged from something like the pure Spanish, to 
something, in its sad fixity, not unlike the pure 
Indian, although I do not suppose there was one 
pure blood of either race in all the country. As for 
the second, it was a matter of perpetual surprise 
to find, in that world of absolutely mannerless 
Americans, a people full of deportment, solemnly 
courteous, and doing all things with grace and 
decorum. In dress they ran to colour and bright 
sashes. Not even the most Americanised could 
always resist the temptation to stick a red rose into 
his hat-band. Not even the most Americanised 
would descend to wear the vile dress hat of civili- 
sation. Spanish was the language of the streets. 
It was dif^cult to get along without a word or two 
of that language for an occasion. The only com- 



OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 95 

munications in which the population joined were 
with a view to amusement. A weekly public ball 
took place with great etiquette, in addition to the 
numerous fandangoes in private houses. There 
was a really fair amateur brass band. Night after 
night serenaders would be going about the street, 
sometimes in a company and with several instru- 
ments and voices together, sometimes severally, 
each guitar before a different window. It w^as a 
strange thing to lie awake in nineteenth-century 
America, and hear the guitar accompany, and one 
of these old, heart-breaking Spanish love songs 
mount into the night air, perhaps in a deep 
baritone, perhaps in that high-pitched, pathetic, 
womanish alto which is so common among Mexi- 
can men, and which strikes on the unaccustomed 
car as something not entirely human but altogether 
sad. 

The town, then, was essentially and wholly 
Mexican ; and yet almost all the land in the neigh- 
bourhood was held by Americans, and it was from 
the same class, numerically so small, that the prin- 
cipal officials were selected. This Mexican and that 



96 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 

Mexican would describe to you his old family 
estates, not one rood of which remained to him. 
You would ask him how that came about, and elicit 
some tangled story back-foremost, from which you 
gathered that the Americans had been greedy like 
designing men, and the Mexicans greedy like chil- 
dren, but no other certain fact. Their merits and 
their faults contributed alike to the ruin of the 
former landholders. It is true they were improvi- 
dent, and easily dazzled with the sight of ready 
money; but they were gentlefolk besides, and that 
in a way which curiously unfitted them to combat 
Yankee craft. Suppose they have a paper to sign, 
they would think it a reflection on the other party 
to examine the terms with any great minuteness ; 
nay, suppose them to observe some doubtful clause, 
it is ten to one they would refuse from delicacy 
to object to it. I know I am speaking within 
the mark, for I have seen such a case occur, and 
the Mexican, in spite of the advice of his lawyer, 
has signed the imperfect paper like a lamb. To 
have spoken in the matter, he said, above all to 
have let the other party guess that he had seen a 



OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 97 

lawyer, would have " been like doubting his word." 
The scruple sounds oddly to one of ourselves, who 
have been brought up to understand all business 
as a competition in fraud, and honesty itself to be 
a virtue which regards the carrying out but not 
the creation of agreements. This single unworldly 
trait will account for much of that revolution of 
which we are speaking. The Mexicans have the 
name of being great swindlers, but certainly the 
accusation cuts both ways. In a contest of this 
sort, the entire booty would scarcely have passed 
into the hands of the more scrupulous race. 

Physically the Americans have triumphed ; but 
it is not entirely seen how far they have themselves 
been morally conquered. This is, of course, but a 
part of a part of an extraordinary problem now in 
the course of being solved in the various States of 
the American Union. I am reminded of an anec- 
dote. Some years ago, at a great sale of wine, all 
the odd lots were purchased by a grocer in a small 
way in the old town of Edinburgh. The agent 
had the curiosity to visit him some time after and 
inquire what possible use he could have for such 



98 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 

material. He was shown, by way of answer, a 
huge vat where all the liquors, from humble Glad- 
stone to imperial Tokay, were fermenting together. 
" And what," he asked, " do you propose to call 
this?" "I'm no very sure," replied the grocer, 
" but I think it 's going to turn out port." In the 
older Eastern States, I think we may say that this 
hotch-potch of races is going to turn out English, 
or thereabout. But the problem is indefinitely 
varied in other zones. The elements are differently 
mingled in the south, in what we may call the Ter- 
ritorial belt, and in the group of States on the 
Pacific coast. Above all, in these last, \yq may look 
to see some monstrous hybrid — whether good or 
evil, who shall forecast? but certainly original and 
all their own. In my little restaurant at Monterey, 
we have sat down to table day after day, a French- 
man, two Portuguese, an Italian, a Mexican, and 
a Scotchman : we had for common visitors an 
American from Illinois, a nearly pure blood Indian 
woman, and a naturalised Chinese ; and from time 
to time a Switzer and a German came down from 
country ranches for the night. No wonder that 



OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL ^^ 

the Pacific coast is a foreign land to visitors from 
the Eastern States, for each race contributes some- 
thing of its own. Even the despised Chinese have 
taught the youth of CaHfornia, none indeed of 
their virtues, but the debasing use of opium. 
And chief among these influences is that of the 
Mexicans. 

The Mexicans although in the State are out of 
it. They still preserve a sort of international inde- 
pendence, and keep their affairs snug to them- 
selves. Only four or five years ago Vasquez, the 
bandit, his troops being dispersed and the hunt too 
hot for him in other parts of California, returned 
to his native Monterey, and was seen publicly in 
her streets and saloons, fearing no man. The year 
that I was there there occurred two reputed mur- 
ders. As the Montereyans are exceptionally vile 
speakers of each other and of every one behind his 
back, it is not possible for me to judge how much 
truth there may have been in these reports ; but in 
the one case every one believed, and in the other 
some suspected, that there had been foul play ; and 

nobody dreamed for an instant of taking the author- 
LofC. 



loo OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 

ities into their counsel. Now this is, of course, 
characteristic enough of the Mexicans ; but it is 
a noteworthy feature that all the Americans in 
Monterey acquiesced without a word in this inac- 
tion. Even when I spoke to them upon the sub- 
ject, they seemed not to understand my surprise; 
they had forgotten the traditions of their own race 
and upbringing, and become, in a word, wholly 
Mexicanised. 

Again, the Mexicans, having no ready money 
to speak of, rely almost entirely in their business 
transactions upon each other's worthless paper. 
Pedro the penniless pays you with an I O U from 
the equally penniless Miguel. It is a sort of local 
currency by courtesy. Credit in these parts has 
passed into a superstition. I have seen a strong, 
violent man struggling for months to recover a 
debt, and getting nothing but an exchange of waste 
paper. The very storekeepers are averse to asking 
for cash payments, and are more surprised than 
pleased when they are offered. They fear there 
must be something under it, and that you mean to 
withdraw your custom from them. I have seen 



OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL loi 

the enterprising chemist and stationer begging me 
with fervour to let my account run on, although 
I had my purse open in my hand ; and partly from 
the commonness of the case, partly from some 
remains of that generous old Mexican tradition 
which made all men welcome to their tables, a per- 
son may be notoriously both unwilling and unable 
to pay, and still find credit for the necessaries of 
life in the stores of Monterey. Now this villain- 
ous habit of living upon " tick " has grown into 
Californian nature. I do not mean that the Ameri- 
can and European storekeepers of Monterey are as 
lax as Mexicans; I mean that American farmers 
in many parts of the State expect unlimited credit, 
and profit by it in the meanwhile, without a 
thought for consequences. Jew storekeepers have 
already learned the advantage to be gained from 
this ; they lead on the farmer into irretrievable 
indebtedness, and keep him ever after as their 
bond-slave hopelessly grinding in the mill. So the 
whirligig of time brings in its revenges, and except 
that the Jew knows better than to foreclose, you 
may see Americans bound in the same chains with 



102 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 

which they themselves had formerly bound the 
Mexican. It seems as if certain sorts of follies, 
like certain sorts of grain, were natural to the soil 
rather than to the race that holds and tills it for 
the moment. 

In the meantime, however, the Americans rule 
in Monterey County. The new county-seat, Sa- 
linas City, in the bald, corn-bearing plain under the 
Gabelano Peak, is a town of a purely American 
character. The land is held, for the most part, in 
those enormous tracts which are another legacy of 
Mexican days, and form the present chief danger 
and disgrace of California; and the holders are 
mostly of American or British birth. We have 
here in England no idea of the troubles and incon- 
veniences which flow from the existence of these 
large landholders — land-thieves, land-sharks, or 
land-grabbers, they are more commonly and 
plainly called. Thus the townlands of Monterey 
are all in the hands of a single man. How they 
came there is an obscure, vexatious question, and, 
rightly or wrongly, the man is hated with a great 
hatred. His life has been repeatedly in danger. 



OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 103 

Not very long ago, I was told, the stage was 
stopped and examined three evenings in succession 
by disguised horsemen thirsting for his blood. A 
certain house on the Salinas road, they say, he 
always passes in his buggy at full speed, for the 
squatter sent him warning long ago. But a year 
since he was publicly pointed out for death by no 
less a man than Mr. Dennis Kearney. Kearney is 
a man too well known in California, but a word of 
explanation is required for English readers. Origi- 
nally an Irish drayman, he rose, by his command 
of bad language, to almost dictatorial authority in 
the State; throned it there for six months or so, 
his mouth full of oaths, gallowses, and conflagra- 
tions ; was first snuffed out last winter by Mr. 
Coleman, backed by his San Francisco Vigilantes 
and three gatling guns ; completed his own ruin 
by throwing in his lot with the grotesque Green- 
backer party; and had at last to be rescued by his 
old enemies, the police, out of the hands of his 
rebellious followers. It was while he was at the 
top of his fortune that Kearney visited Monterey 
with his battle-cry against Chinese labour, the rail- 



I04 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 

road monopolists, and the land-thieves; and his 
one articulate counsel to the Montereyans was to 
" hang David Jacks.'' Had the town been Ameri- 
can, in my private opinion, this would have been 
done years ago. Land is a subject on which there 
is no jesting in the West, and I have seen my friend 
the lawyer drive out of Monterey to adjust a com- 
petition of titles with the face of a captain going 
into battle and his Smith-and-Wesson convenient 
to his hand. 

On the ranche of another of these landholders 
you may find our old friend, the truck system, in 
full operation. Men live there, year in year out, 
to cut timber for a nominal wage, wdiich is all con- 
sumed in supplies. The longer they remain in this 
desirable service the deeper they will fall in debt 
— a burlesque injustice in a new country, where 
labour should be precious, and one of those typical 
instances which explains the prevailing discontent 
and the success of the demagogue Kearney. 

In a comparison between what was and what is 
in California, the praisers of times past will fix 
upon the Indians of Carmel. The valley drained 



OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 105 

by the river so named is a true Calif ornian valley, 
bare, clotted with chaparral, overlooked by quaint, 
unfinished hills. The Carmel runs by many pleas- 
ant farms, a clear and shallow river, loved by 
wading kine; and at last, as it is falling towards 
a quicksand and the great Pacific, passes a ruined 
mission on a hill. From the mission church the 
eye embraces a great field of ocean, and the ear is 
filled with a continuous sound of distant breakers 
on the shore. But the day of the Jesuit has gone 
b};, the day of the Yankee has succeeded, and there 
is no one left to care for the converted savage. 
The church is roofless and ruinous, sea-breezes and 
sea-fogs, and the alternation of the rain and sun- 
shine, daily widening the breaches and casting the 
crockets from the wall. As an antiquity in this 
new land, a quaint specimen of missionary archi- 
tecture, and a memorial of good deeds, it had a 
triple claim to preservation from all thinking 
people ; but neglect and abuse have been its por- 
tion. There is no sign of American interference, 
save wdiere a headboard has been torn from a grave 
to be a mark for pistol bullets. So it is with the 



io6 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 

Indians for whom it was erected. Their lands, I 
was told, are being yearly encroached upon by the 
neighbouring American proprietor, and with that 
exception no man troubles his head for the Indians 
of Carmel. Only one day in the year, the day 
before our Guy Fawkes, the padre drives over the 
hill from Monterey ; the little sacristy, which is the 
only covered portion of the church, is filled with 
seats and decorated for the service; the Indians 
troop together, their bright dresses contrasting 
with their dark and melancholy faces; and there, 
among a crowd of somewhat unsympathetic holi- 
day-makers, you may hear God served with per- 
haps more touching circumstances than in any 
other temple under heaven. An Indian, stone- 
blind and about eighty years of age, conducts the 
singing; other Indians compose the choir; yet 
they have the Gregorian music at their finger ends, 
and pronounce the Latin so correctly that I could 
follow the meaning as they sang. The pronunci- 
ation was odd and nasal, the singing hurried and 
staccato. *' In saecula saeculo-ho-horum," they went, 
w^ith a vigorous aspirate to every additional syl- 



OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 107 

lable. I have never seen faces more vividly lit up 
with joy than the faces of these Indian singers. 
It was to them not only the worship of God, nor 
an act by which they recalled and commemorated 
better days, but was besides an exercise of culture, 
where all they knew of art and letters was united 
and expressed. And it made a man's heart sorry 
for the good fathers of yore who had taught them 
to dig and to reap, to read and to sing, who had 
given them European mass-books which they still 
preserve and study in their cottages, and who had 
now passed away from all authority and influence 
in that land — to be succeeded by greedy land- 
thieves and sacrilegious pistol-shots. So ugly a 
thing may our Anglo-Saxon Protestantism appear 
beside the doings of the Society of Jesus. 

But revolution in this world succeeds to revo- 
lution. All that I say in this paper is in a paulo- 
past tense. The Monterey of last year exists no 
longer. A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert 
by the railway. Three sets of diners sit down suc- 
cessively to table. Invaluable toilettes figure along 
the beach and between the live-oaks; and Mon- 



io8 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 

terey is advertised in the newspapers, and posted 
in the waiting-rooms at railway stations, as a 
resort for wealth and fashion. Alas for the little 
town ! it is not strong enough to resist the influ- 
ence of the flaunting caravanserai, and the poor, 
cjuaint, penniless native gentlemen of Monterey 
must perish, like a lower race, before the million- 



aire vulgarians of the Big Bonanza. 



[1880.] 



FONTAINEBLEAU 

VILLAGE COMMUNITIES OF PAINTERS 

I 

THE charm of Fontainebleau is a thing 
apart. It is a place that people love even 
more than they admire. The vigorous 
forest air, the silence, the majestic avenues of high- 
way, the wilderness of tumbled boulders, the great 
age and dignity of certain groves — these are but 
ingredients, they are not the secret of the philtre. 
The place is sanative; the air, the light, the per- 
fumes, and the shapes of things concord in happy 
harmony. The artist may be idle and not fear the 
'' blues." He may dally with his life. Mirth, 
lyric mirth, and a vivacious classical contentment 
are of the very essence of the better kind of art; 
and these, in that most smiling forest, he has the 
chance to learn or to remember. Even on the plain 
of Biere, where the Angelus of Millet still tolls 



no FONTAINEBLEAU 

upon the ear of fancy, a larger air, a higher heaven, 
something ancient and healthy in the face of na- 
ture, purify the niind alike from dulness and 
hysteria. There is no place where the young are 
more gladly conscious of their youth, or the old 
better contented with their age. 

The fact of its great and special beauty further 
recommends this country to the artist. The field 
was chosen by men in whose blood there still raced 
some of the gleeful or solemn exultation of great 
art — Millet who loved dignity like Michelangelo, 
Rousseau whose modern brush was dipped in the 
p-lamour of the ancients. It was chosen before 
the day of that strange turn in the history of art, 
of which we now perceive the culmination in im- 
pressionistic tales and pictures — that voluntary 
aversion of the eye from all speciously strong and 
beautiful effects — that disinterested love of dul- 
ness which has set so many Peter Bells to paint 
the river-side primrose. It was then chosen for its 
proximity to Paris. And for the same cause, and 
by the force of tradition, the painter of to-day 
continues to inhabit and to paint it. There is in 



FONTAINEBLEAU iii 

France scenery incomparable for romance and 
harmony. Provence, and the vahey of the Rhone 
from Vienne to Tarascon, are one succession of 
masterpieces waiting for the brush. The beauty is 
not merely beauty; it tells, besides, a tale to the 
imagination, and surprises while it charms. Here 
you shall see castellated towns that would befit the 
scenery of dreamland ; streets that glow with 
colour like cathedral windows; hills of the most 
exquisite proportions ; flowers of every precious 
colour, growing thick like grass. All these, by the 
grace of railway travel, are brought to the very 
door of the modern painter; yet he does not seek 
them ; he remains faithful to Fontainebleau, to 
the eternal bridge of Gretz, to the watering-pot 
cascade in Cernay valley. Even Fontainebleau 
was chosen for him ; even in Fontainebleau he 
shrinks from what is sharply charactered. But 
one thing, at least, is certain, whatever he may 
choose to paint and in whatever manner, it is good 
for the artist to dwell among graceful shapes, 
Fontainebleau, if it be but quiet scenery, is classi- 
cally graceful ; and though the student may look 



112 FONTAI NEBLE AU 

for different qualities, this quality, silently present, 
Avill educate his hand and eye. 

But, before all its other advantages — charm, 
loveliness, or proximity to Paris — comes the 
great fact that it is already colonised. The insti- 
tution of a painters' colony is a work of time and 
tact. The populatio!i must be conquered. The 
inn-keeper has to be taught, and he soon learns, the 
lesson of unlimited credit; he must be taught to 
welcome as a favoured guest a young gentleman in 
a very greasy coat, and with little baggage beyond 
a box of colours and a canvas ; and he must learn 
to preserve his faith in customers who will eat 
heartily and drink of the best, borrow money to 
buy tobacco, and perhaps not pay a stiver for a 
year. A colour merchant has next to be attracted. 
A certain vogue must be given to the place, lest the 
painter, most gregarious of animals, should find 
himself alone. And no sooner are these first diffi- 
culties overcome, than fresh perils spring up upon 
the other side; and the bourgeois and the tourist 
are knocking at the gate. This is the crucial 
moment for the colony. If these intruders gain a 



FONTAI NEBLEAU 113 

footing, they not only banish freedom and amen- 
ity ; pretty soon, by means of their long purses, 
they will have undone the education of the inn- 
keeper ; prices will rise and credit shorten ; and 
the poor painter must fare farther on and find 
another hamlet. " Not here, O Apollo ! " will be- 
come his song. Thus Trouville and, the other 
day, St. Raphael were lost to the arts. Curious 
and not always edifying are the shifts that the 
French student uses to defend his lair; like the 
cuttlefish, he must sometimes blacken the waters 
of his chosen pool ; but at such a time and for so 
practical a purpose Mrs. Grundy must allow him 
license. Where his own purse and credit are not 
threatened, he will do the honours of his village 
generously. Any artist is made welcome, through 
whatever medium he may seek expression ; science 
is respected ; even the idler, if he prove, as he so 
rarely does, a gentleman, will soon begin to find 
himself at home. And when that essentially mod- 
ern creature, the English or American girl-student, 
began to walk calmly into his favourite inns as if 

into a drawing-room at home, the French painter 

8 



114 FONTAINEBLE AU 

owned himself defenceless; he submitted or he 
fled. His French respectability, quite as precise 
as ours, though covering different provinces of 
life, recoiled aghast before the innovation. But 
the girls were painters; there w^as nothing to be 
done; and Barbizon, when I last saw it and for 
the time at least, was practically ceded to the fair 
invader. Paterfamilias, on the other hand, the 
common tourist, the holiday shopman, and the 
cheap young gentleman upon the spree, he hounded 
from his villages with every circumstance of 
contumely. 

This purely artistic society is excellent for the 
young artist. The lads are mostly fools ; they hold 
the latest orthodoxy in its crudeness ; they are at 
that stage of education, for the most part, when a 
man is too much occupied with style to be aware 
of the necessity for any matter; and this, above 
all for the Englishman, is excellent. To work 
grossly at the trade, to forget sentiment, to think 
of his material and nothing else, is, for awhile at 
least, the king's highway of progress. Here, in 
England, too many painters and writers dwell 



FONTAINEBLEAU 115 

dispersed, unshielded, among the intelhgent bour- 
geois. These, when they are not merely indiffer- 
ent, prate to him about the lofty aims and moral 
influence of art. And this is the lad's ruin. For 
art is, first of all and last of all, a trade. The love 
of words and not a desire to publish new discov- 
eries, the love of form and not a novel reading of 
historical events, mark the vocation of the w^-iter 
and the painter. The arabesque, properly speak- 
ing, and even in literature, is the first fancy of the 
artist; he first plays with his material as a child 
plays with a kaleidoscope; and he is already in a 
second stage wdien he begins to use his pretty 
counters for the end of representation. In that, 
he must pause long and toil faithfully ; that is his 
apprenticeship ; and it is only the few who will 
really grow beyond it, and go forward, fully 
equipped, to do the business of real art — to give 
life to abstractions and significance and charm to 
facts. In the meanwhile, let him dwell much 
among his fellow-craftsmen. They alone can take 
a serious interest in the childish tasks and pitiful 
successes of these years. They alone can behold 



ii6 FONTAI N EBLEAU 

with equanimity this fingering of the dumb key- 
board, this pohshing of empty sentences, this dull 
and literal painting of dull and insignificant sub- 
jects. Outsiders will spur him on. They will say, 
*' Why do you not write a great book ? paint a 
great picture?" If his guardian angel fail him, 
they may even persuade him to the attempt, and, 
ten to one, his hand is coarsened and his style 
falsified for life. 

And this brings me to a warning. The life of 
the apprentice to any art is both unstrained and 
pleasing; it is strewn with small successes in the 
midst of a career of failure, patiently supported ; 
the heaviest scholar is conscious of a certain prog- 
ress; and if he come not appreciably nearer to 
the art of Shakespeare, grows letter-perfect in the 
domain of A-B, ab. But the time comes when a 
man should cease prelusory gymnastic, stand up, 
put a violence upon his will, and for better or 
worse, begin the business of creation. This evil 
day there is a tendency continually to postpone: 
above all with painters. They have made so many 
studies that it has become a habit ; they make more, 



FONTAI NEBLE AU 117 

the walls of exhibitions blush with them; and 
death finds these aged students still busy with their 
horn-book. This class of man finds a congenial 
home in artist villages ; in the slang of the Eng- 
lish colony at Barbizon we used to call them 
" Snoozers." Continual returns to the city, the 
society of men farther advanced, the study of great 
works, a sense of humour or, if such a thing is to 
be had, a little religion or philosophy, are the 
means of treatment. It will be time enough to 
think of curing the malady after it has been 
caught ; for to catch it is the very thing for which 
you seek that dream-land of the painters' village. 
" Snoozing " is a part of the artistic education ; 
and the rudiments must be learned stupidly, all 
else being forgotten, as if they were an object in 
themselves. 

Lastly, there is something, or there seems to 
be something, in the very air of France that com- 
municates the love of style. Precision, clarity, the 
cleanly and crafty employment of material, a grace 
in the handling, apart from any value in the 
thought, seem to be acquired by the mere resi- 



ii8 FONTAI NE BLEAU 

dence; or if not acquired, become at least the more 
appreciated. The air of Paris is ahve with this 
technical inspiration. And to leave that airy city 
and awake next day upon the borders of the 
forest is but to change externals. The same spirit 
of dexterity and finish breathes from the long 
alleys and the lofty groves, from the wildernesses 
that are still pretty in their confusion, and the 
great plain that contrives to be decorative in its 
emptiness. 

II 

In spite of its really considerable extent, the 
forest of Fontainebleau is hardly anywhere tedious. 
I know the whole western side of it with what, 
I suppose, I may call thoroughness; well enough 
at least to testify that there is no square mile with- 
out some special character and charm. Such 
quarters, for instance, as the Long Rocher, the 
Bas-Breau, and the Reine Blanche, might be a 
hundred miles apart; they have scarce a point in 
common beyond the silence of the birds. The two 
last are really conterminous; and in both are tall 



FO NTAI NEB LE AU 119 

and ancient trees that have outHved a thousand 
pohtical vicissitudes. But in the one the great oaks 
prosper placidly upon an even floor; they be- 
shadow a great field ; and the air and the light are 
very free below their stretching boughs. In the 
other the trees find difficult footing ; castles of white 
rock lie tumbled one upon another, the foot slips, 
the crooked viper slumbers, the moss clings in the 
crevice; and above it all the great beech goes 
spiring and casting forth her arms, and, with a 
grace beyond church architecture, canopies this 
rugged chaos. Meanwhile, dividing the two can- 
tons, the broad white causeway of the Paris road 
runs in an avenue : a road conceived for pageantry 
and for triumphal marches, an avenue for an 
army ; but, its days of glory over, it now lies 
grilling in the sun between cool groves, and only 
at intervals the vehicle of the cruising tourist is 
seen far away and faintly audible along its ample 
sweep. A little upon one side, and you find a dis- 
trict of sand and birch and boulder; a little upon 
the other lies the valley of Apremont, all juniper 
and heather; and close beyond that you may walk 



I20 FONTAINEBLEAU 

into a zone of pine-trees. So artfully are the in- 
gredients mingled. Nor must it be forgotten that, 
in all this part, you come continually forth upon 
a hill-top, and behold the plain, northward and 
westward, like an unrefulgent sea; nor that all 
day long the shadows keep changing; and at last, 
to the red fires of sunset, night succeeds, and with 
the night a new forest, full of whisper, gloom, and 
fragrance. There are few things more renovating 
than to leave Paris, the lamplit arches of the Car- 
rousel, and the long alignment of the glittering 
streets, and to bathe the senses in this fragrant 
darkness of the wood. 

In this continual variety the mind is kept vividly 
alive. It is a changeful place to paint, a stirring 
place to live in. As fast as your foot carries you, 
you pass from scene to scene, each vigorously 
painted in the colours of the sun, each endeared 
by that hereditary spell of forests on the mind of 
man who still remembers and salutes the ancient 
refuge of his race. 

And yet the forest has been civilised throughout. 
The most savage corners bear a name, and have 



FONTAINEBLEAU 121 

been cherished hke antiquities; in the most remote,. 
Nature has prepared and balanced her effects as if 
with conscious art ; and man, with his guiding 
arrows of bhie paint, has countersigned the pic- 
ture. After your farthest wandering, you are 
never surprised to come forth upon the vast avenue 
of highway, to strike the centre point of branching 
alleys, or to find the aqueduct trailing, thousand- 
footed, through the brush. It is not a wilderness ; 
it is rather a preserve. And, fitly enough, the 
centre of the maze is not a hermit's cavern. In the 
midst, a little mirthful town lies sunlit, humming 
with the business of pleasure; and the palace, 
breathing distinction and peopled by historic 
names, stands smokeless among gardens. 

Perhaps the last attempt at savage life was that 
of the harmless humbug who called himself the 
hermit. In a great tree, close by the high-road, 
he had built himself a little cabin after the manner 
of the Swiss Family Robinson ; thither he mounted 
at night, by the romantic aid of a rope ladder ; and 
if dirt be any proof of sincerity, the man was 
savage as a Sioux. I had the pleasure of his ac- 



122 FO NT A I NEB LE AU 

quaintance; he appeared grossly stupid, not in his 
perfect wits, and interested in nothing but small 
change; for that he had a great avidity. In the 
course of time he proved to be a chicken-stealer, 
and vanished from his perch ; and perhaps from 
the first he was no true votary of forest freedom, 
but an ingenious, theatrically minded beggar, and 
his cabin in the tree was only stock-in-trade to beg 
withal. The choice of his position w^ould seem to 
indicate so much ; for if in the forest there are no 
places still to be discovered, there are many that 
have been forgotten, and that lie unvisited. There, 
to be sure, are the blue arrows waiting to reconduct 
you, now blazed upon a tree, now posted in the 
corner of a rock. But your security from interrup- 
tion is complete; you might camp for weeks, if 
there w^ere only water, and not a soul suspect your 
presence; and if I may suppose the reader to have 
committed some great crime and come to me for 
aid, I think I could still find my w^ay to a small 
cavern, fitted with a hearth and chimney, where he 
might lie perfectly concealed. A confederate land- 
scape-painter might daily supply him with food; 



FONTAINEBLEAU 123 

for water, he would have to make a nightly tramp 
as far as to the nearest pond ; and at last, when the 
hue and cry began to blow over, he might get 
gently on the train at some side station, work 
round by a series of junctions, and be quietly cap- 
tured at the frontier. 

Thus Fontainebleau, although it is truly but a 
pleasure-ground, and although, in favourable 
weather, and in the more celebrated quarters, it 
literally buzzes with the tourist, yet has some of 
the immunities and offe:-s some of the repose of 
natural forests. And the solitary, although he 
must return at night to his frequented inn, may 
yet pass the day with his own thoughts in the com- 
panionable silence of the trees. The demands of 
the imagination vary ; some can be alone in a back 
garden looked upon by windows ; others, like the 
ostrich, are content with a solitude that meets 
the eye; and others, again, expand in fancy to the 
very borders of their desert, and are irritably con- 
scious of a hunter's camp in an adjacent county. 
To these last, of course, Fontainebleau will seem 
but an extended tea-garden : a Rosherville on a 



124 FONTAINEBLEAU 

by-day. But to the plain man it offers solitude : an 
excellent thing in itself, and a good whet for 
company. 

Ill 

I WAS for some time a consistent Barbizonian; 
et ego in Arcadia vixi, it was a pleasant season; 
and that noiseless hamlet lying close among the bor- 
ders of the wood is for me, as for so many others, 
a green spot in memory. The great Millet was 
just dead, the green shutters of his modest house 
were closed ; his daughters were in mourning. The 
date of my first visit was thus an epoch in the his- 
tory of art : in a lesser way, it was an epoch in the 
history of the Latin Quarter. The Petit Ccnacic 
was dead and buried; Murger and his crew of 
sponging vagabonds were all at rest from their 
expedients; the tradition of their real life was 
nearly lost; and the petrified legend of the Vie de 
Bohemc had become a sort of gospel, and still gave 
the cue to zealous imitators. But if the book be 
written in rose-water, the imitation was still farther 
expurgated ; honesty was the rule ; the inn-keepers 



FONT AI N EBLEAU 125 

gave, as T have said, almost unlimited credit ; they 
suffered the seediest painter to depart, to take all 
his belongings, and to leave his bill unpaid ; and 
if they sometimes lost, it was by English and 
Americans alone. At the same time, the great 
influx of Anglo-Saxons had begun to affect the 
life of the studious. There had been disputes ; 
and, in one instance at least, the English and the 
Americans had made common cause to prevent a 
cruel pleasantry. It would be well if nations and 
races could communicate their qualities ; but in 
practice when they look upon each other, they have 
an eye to nothing but defects. The Anglo-Saxon 
is essentially dishonest; the French is devoid by 
nature of the principle that we call " Fair Play.'' 
The Frenchman marvelled at the scruples of his 
guest, and, when that defender of innocence retired 
over-seas and left his bills unpaid, he marvelled 
once again; the good and evil were, in his eyes, 
part and parcel of the same eccentricity; a shrug 
expressed his judgment upon both. 

At Barbizon there was no master, no pontiff in 
the arts. Palizzi bore rule at Gretz — urbane, 



126 FONTAINEBLEAU 

superior rule — his memory rich in anecdotes of 
the great men of yore, his mind fertile in theories ; 
sceptical, composed, and venerable to the eye; and 
yet beneath these outworks, all twittering with 
Italian superstition, his eye scouting for omens, 
and the whole fabric of his manners giving way on 
the appearance of a hunchback. Cernay had 
Pelouse, the admirable, placid Pelouse, smilingl}'- 
critical of youth, who, when a full-blown com- 
mercial traveller, suddenly threw down his sam- 
ples, bought a colour-box, and became the master 
whom we have all admired. Marlotte, for a cen- 
tral figure, boasted Olivier de Penne. Only Bar- 
bizon, since the death of Millet, was a headless 
commonwealth. Even its secondary lights, and 
those who in my day made the stranger welcom.e, 
have since deserted it. The good Lachevre has 
departed, carrying his household gods; and long 
before that Gaston Lafenestre was taken from 
our midst by an untimely death. He died before 
he had deserved success ; it may be, he would never 
have deserved it ; but his kind, comely, modest 
countenance still haunts the memory of all who 



FONTAINEBLEAU 127 

knew him. Another — whom I will not name — 
has moved farther on, pursuing the strange Odys- 
sey of his decadence. His days of royal favour 
had departed even then; but he still retained, in 
his narrower life at Barbizon, a certain stamp of 
conscious importance, hearty, friendly, filling the 
room, the occupant of several chairs; nor had he 
yet ceased his losing battle, still labouring upon 
great canvases that none would buy, still waiting 
the return of fortune. But these days also were 
too good to last; and the former favourite of two 
sovereigns fled, if I heard the truth, by night. 
There was a time when he w^as counted a great 
man, and Millet but a dauber; behold, how the 
whirligig of time brings in his revenges ! To pity 
Millet is a piece of arrogance; if life be hard for 
such resolute and pious spirits, it is harder still 
for us, had we the wit to understand it; but we 
may pity his unhappier rival, who, for no apparent 
merit, was raised to opulence and momentary fame, 
and, through no apparent fault, was suffered step 
by step to sink again to nothing. No misfortune 
can exceed the bitterness of such back-foremost 



128 FO NTAI NEBLE AU 

progress, even bravely supported as it was ; but to 
those also who were taken early from the easel, a 
regret is due. From all the young men of this 
period, one stood out by the vigour of his promise ; 
he was in the age of fermentation, enamoured of 
eccentricities. " II faut faire de la peinture nou- 
velle," was his watchword; but if time and expe- 
rience had continued his education, if he had been 
eranted health to return from these excursions 
to the steady and the central, I must believe that 
the name of Hills had become famous. 

Siron's inn, that excellent artists' barrack, was 
managed upon easy principles. At any hour of the 
night, when you returned from wandering in the 
forest, you went to the billiard-room and helped 
yourself to liquors, or descended to the cellar and 
returned laden with beer or wine. The Sirons 
were all locked in slumber; there was none to 
check your inroads ; only at the week's end a com- 
putation was made, the gross sum was divided, 
and a varying share set down to every lodger's 
name under the rubric : estrats. Upon the more 
long-suffering the larger tax was levied ; and your 



FO N TAI NEB LE AU 129 

bill lengthened in a direct proportion to the easiness 
of your disposition. At any hour of the morning, 
again, you could get your coffee or cold milk, and 
set forth into the forest. The doves had perhaps 
wakened you, fluttering into your chamber; and 
on the threshold of the inn you were met by the 
aroma of the forest. Close by w^ere the great aisles, 
the mossy boulders, the interminable field of forest 
shadow. There you were free to dream and wan- 
der. And at noon, and again at six o'clock, a good 
meal awaited you on Siron's table. The whole of 
your accommodation, set aside that varying item 
of the cstrats, cost you five francs a day ; your bill 
was never offered you until you asked it ; and if 
you were out of luck's way, you might depart for 
where you pleased and leave it pending. 

IV 

Theoretically, the house w^as open to all 
comers ; practically, it was a kind of club. The 
guests protected themselves, and, in so doing, they 
protected Siron. Formal manners being laid aside, 
essential courtesy was the more rigidly exacted; 



ijo FONTAINEBLEAU 

the new arrival had to feel the pulse of the so- 
ciety; and a breach of its undefined observances 
was promptly punished. A man might be as plain, 
as dull, as slovenly, as free of speech as he desired ; 
but to a touch of presumption or a word of hector- 
ing these free Barbizonians were as sensitive as 
a tea-party of maiden ladies. I have seen people 
driven forth from Barbizon; it would be difficult 
to say in words what they had done, but they de- 
served their fate. They had shown themselves 
unworthy to enjoy these corporate freedoms ; they 
had pushed themselves ; they had '' made their 
head " ; they wanted tact to appreciate the " fine 
shades " of Barbizonian etiquette. And once they 
were condemned, the process of extrusion was 
ruthless in its cruelty ; after one evening with the 
formidable Bodmer, the Baily of our common- 
wealth, the erring stranger was beheld no more; 
he rose exceeding early the next day, and the first 
coach conveyed him from the scene of his discom- 
fiture. These sentences of banishment were never, 
in my knowledge, delivered against an artist ; such 
would, I believe, have been illegal ; but the odd and 



FONTAIN EB LEAU 131 

pleasant fact is this, that they were never needed. 
Painters, sculptors, writers, singers, I have seen 
all of these in Barbizon ; and some were sulky, and 
some blatant and inane; but one and all entered 
at once into the spirit of the association. This 
singular society is purely French, a creature of 
French virtues, and possibly of French defects. It 
cannot be imitated by the English. The rough- 
ness, the impatience, the more obvious selfishness, 
and even the more ardent friendships of the Anglo- 
Saxon, speedily dismember such a commonwealth. 
But this random gathering of young French 
painters, with neither apparatus nor parade of 
government, yet kept the life of the place upon 
a certain footing, insensibly imposed their etiquette 
upon the docile, and by caustic speech enforced 
their edicts against the unwelcome. To think of it 
is to wonder the more at the strange failure of their 
race upon the larger theatre. This inbred civility 
— to use the word in its completest meaning — this 
natural and facile adjustment of contending liber- 
ties, seems all that is required to make a governable 
nation and a just and prosperous country. 



132 FONTAINEBLEAU 

Our society, thus purged and guarded, was full 
of high spirits, of laughter, and of the initiative 
of youth. The few elder men who joined us were 
still young at heart, and took the key from their 
companions. We returned from long stations in 
the fortifying air, our blood renewed by the sun- 
shine, our spirits refreshed by the silence of the 
forest ; the Babel of loud voices sounded good ; 
we fell to eat and play like the natural man ; and 
in the high inn chamber, panelled with indifferent 
pictures and lit by candles guttering in the night 
air, the talk and laughter sounded far into the 
night. It was a good place and a good life for any 
naturally minded youth ; better yet for the student 
of painting, and perhaps best of all for the student 
of letters. He, too, w^as saturated in this atmos- 
phere of style; he w^as shut out from the disturb- 
ing currents of the world, he might forget that 
there existed other and more pressing interests 
than that of art. But, in such a place, it was hardly 
possible to write ; he could not drug his conscience, 
like the painter, by the production of listless 
studies; he saw himself idle among many who 



FONTAINEBLEAU 133 

were apparently, and some who were really, em- 
ployed; and what with the impulse of increasing 
health and the continual provocation of romantic 
scenes, he became tormented with the desire to 
w^ork. He enjoyed a strenuous idleness full of 
visions, hearty meals, long, sweltering walks, mirth 
among companions; and still floating like music 
through his brain, foresights of great works that 
Shakespeare might be proud to have conceived, 
headless epics, glorious torsos of dramas, and 
words that were alive with import. So in youth, 
like Moses from the mountain, we have sights of 
that House Beautiful of art which we shall never 
enter. They are dreams and unsubstantial ; visions 
of style that repose upon no base of human mean- 
ing; the last heart-throbs of that excited amateur 
who has to die in all of us before the artist can be 
born. But they come to us in such a rainbow of 
glory that all subsequent achievement appears dull 
and earthly in comparison. We were all artists ; 
almost all in the age of illusion, cultivating an 
imaginary genius, and walking to the strains of 
some deceiving Ariel; small wonder, indeed, if 



134 FONTAINEBLEAU 

we were happy! But art, of whatever nature, is 
a kind mistress ; and though these dreams of youth 
fall by their own baselessness, others succeed, 
graver and more substantial ; the symptoms 
change, the amiable malady endures ; and still, at 
an equal distance, the House Beautiful shines upon 
its hill-top. 



Gretz lies out of the forest, down by the bright 
river. It boasts a mill, an ancient church, a castle, 
and a bridge of many sterlings. And the bridge 
is a piece of public property; anonymously fa- 
mous ; beaming on the incurious dilettante from 
the walls of a hundred exhibitions. I have seen 
it in the Salon ; I have seen it in the Academy ; 
I have seen it in the last French Exposition, 
excellently done by Bloomer; in a black-and- 
white, by Mr. A. Henley, it once adorned this 
essay in the pages of the Magazine of Art. 
Long-suffering bridge! And if you visit Gretz 
to-morrow, you shall find another generation, 
camped at the bottom of Chevillon's garden 



FONTAINEBLEAU 135 

under their white umbrellas, and doggedly paint- 
ing it again. 

The bridge taken for granted, Gretz is a less 
inspiring place than Barbizon. I give it the 
palm over Cernay. There is something ghastly 
in the great empty village square of Cernay, with 
the inn tables standing in one corner, as though 
the stage wxre set for rustic opera, and in the early 
morning all the painters breaking their fast upon 
white wine under the windows of the villagers. 
It is vastly different to awake in Gretz, to go down 
the green inn-garden, to find the river streaming 
through the bridge, and to see the dawn begin 
across the poplared level. The meals are laid in 
the cool arbour, under fluttering leaves. The 
splash of oars and bathers, the bathing costumes 
out to dry, the trim canoes beside the jetty, tell of 
a society that has an eye to pleasure. There is 
'' something to do " at Gretz. Perhaps, for that 
very reason, I can recall no such enduring ardours, 
no such glories of exhilaration, as among the 
solemn groves and uneventful hours of Barbizon. 
This " something to do " is a great enemy to joy ; 



136 FONTAINEBLEAU 

it is a way out of it; you wreak your high spirits 
on some cut-and-dry employment, and behold them 
gone ! But Gretz is a merry place after its kind : 
pretty to see, merry to inhabit. The course of its 
pellucid river, whether up or down, is full of gentle 
attractions for the navigator : islanded reed-mazes 
where, in autumn, the red berries cluster ; the mir- 
rored and inverted images of trees ; lilies, and 
mills, and the foam and thunder of weirs. And 
of all noble sweeps of roadway, none is nobler, 
on a windy dusk, than the highroad to Nemours 
between its lines of talking poplar. 

But even Gretz is changed. The old inn, long 
shored and trussed and buttressed, fell at length 
under the mere weight of years, and the place as 
it was is but a fading image in the memory of 
former guests. They, indeed, recall the ancient 
wooden stair ; they recall the rainy evening, the 
wide hearth, the blaze of the twig fire, and the com- 
pany that gathered round the pillar in the kitchen. 
But the material fabric is now dust ; soon, with 
the last of its inhabitants, its very memory shall 
follow; and they, in their turn, shall suffer the 



FONTAINEBLEAU 137 

same law, and, both in name and lineament, vanish 
from the world of men. " For remembrance of the 
old house' sake," as Pepys once quaintly put it, let 
me tell one story. When the tide of invasion 
swept over France, two foreign painters were left 
stranded and penniless in Gretz ; and there, until 
the war was over, the Chevillons ungrudgingly 
harboured them. It was difficult to obtain sup- 
plies; but the two waifs were still welcome to the 
best, sat down daily with the family to table, and 
at the due intervals were supplied with clean nap- 
kins, which they scrupled to employ. Madame 
Chevillon observed the fact and reprimanded them. 
But they stood firm ; eat they must, but having 
no money they would soil no napkins. 

VI 

Nemours and' Moret, for all they are so pictur- 
esque, have been little visited by painters. They 
are, indeed, too populous ; they have manners of 
their own, and might resist the drastic process of 
colonisation. Montigny has been somewhat 
strangely neglected ; I never knew it inhabited 



ijS F O N T A I N E B L E A U 

but once, when Will H. Low installed himself there 
with a barrel of piqiiettc, and entertained his 
friends in a leafy trellis above the weir, in sight of 
the green country and to the music of the falling 
water. It was a most airy, quaint, and pleasant 
place of residence, just too rustic to be stagey; 
and from my memories of the place in general, and 
that garden trellis in particular — at morning, 
visited by birds, or at night, when the dew fell 
and the stars were of the party — I am inclined 
to think perhaps too favourably of the future 
of Montigny. Chailly-en-Biere has outlived all 
things, and lies dustily slumbering in the plain — 
the cemetery of itself. The great road remains 
to testify of its former bustle of postilions and 
carriage bells ; and, like memorial tablets, there 
still hang in the inn room the paintings of a former 
generation, dead or decorated long ago. In my 
time, one man only, greatly daring, dwelt there. 
From time to time he would walk over to Barbizon, 
like a shade revisiting the glimpses of the moon, 
and after some communication with flesh and 
blood return to his austere hermitage. But even 



FONTAINEBLEAU 139 

he, when I last revisited the forest, had come to 
Barbizon for good, and closed the roll of Chailly- 
ites. It may revive — but I much doubt it. 
Acheres and Recloses still wait a pioneer ; Bourron 
is out of the question, being merely Gretz over 
again, without the river, the bridge, or the beauty ; 
and of all the possible places on the western side, 
Marlotte alone remains to be discussed. I scarcely 
know Marlotte, and, very likely for that reason, 
am not much in love with it. It seems a glaring 
and unsightly hamlet. The inn of Mother Antonie 
is unattractive; and its more reputable rival, 
though comfortable enough, is commonplace. Mar- 
lotte has a name ; it is famous ; if I were the young 
painter I would leave it alone in its glory. 

VII 

These are the words of an old stager; and 
though time is a good conservative in forest places, 
much may be untrue to-day. Many of us have 
passed Arcadian days there and moved on, but yet 
left a portion of our souls behind us buried in the 
woods. I would not dig for these reliquiae; they 



HO FONTAINEBLEAU 

are incommunicable treasures that will not enrich 
the finder; and yet there may lie, interred below 
great oaks or scattered along forest paths, stores of 
youth's dynamite and dear remembrances. And 
as one generation passes on and renovates the field 
of tillage for the next, I entertain a fancy that 
when the young men of to-day go forth into the 
forest, they shall find the air still vitalised by the 
spirits of their predecessors, and, like those " un- 
heard melodies " that are the sweetest of all, the 
memory of our laughter shall still haunt the field 
of trees. Those merry voices that in woods call the 
wanderer farther, those thrilling silences and whis- 
pers of the groves, surely in Fontainebleau they 
must be vocal of me and my companions ? We are 
not content to pass away entirely from the scenes 
of our delight; we would leave, if but in grati- 
tude, a pillar and a legend. 

One generation after another fall like honey- 
bees upon this memorable forest, rifle its sweets, 
pack themselves with vital memories, and when 
the theft is consummated depart again into life 
richer, but poorer also. The forest, indeed, they 



FONTAINEBLEAU 141 

have possessed, .from that day forward it is theirs 
indissolubly, and they will return to walk in it at 
night in the fondest of their dreams, and use it 
for ever in their books and pictures. Yet when 
they made their packets, and put up their notes 
and sketches, something, it should seem, had been 
forgotten. A projection of themselves shall appear 
to haunt unfriended these scenes of happiness, a 
natural child of fancy, begotten and forgotten un- 
awares. Over the whole field of our wanderings 
such fetches are still travelling like indefatigable 
bagmen; but the imps of Fontainebleau, as of all 
beloved spots, are very long of life, and memory 
is piously unwilling to forget their orphanage. If 
anywhere about that wood you meet my airy 
bantling, greet him with tenderness. He was a 
pleasant lad, though now abandoned. And when 
it comes to your own turn to quit the forest may 
you leave behind you such another; no Antony or 
Werther, let us hope, no tearful whipster, but, as 
becomes this not uncheerful and most active age in 
which we figure, the child of happy hours. 

No art, it may be said, was ever perfect, and not 



142 F O N T A 1 N E B L E A U 

many noble, that has not been .mirthfully con- 
ceived. And no man, it may be added, was ever 
anything but a wet blanket and a cross to his com- 
panions who boasted not a copious spirit of enjoy- 
ment. Whether as man or artist, let the youth 
make haste to Fontainebleau, and once there let 
him address himself to the spirit of the place; he 
will learn more from exercise than from studies, 
although both are necessary; and if he can get 
into his heart the gaiety and inspiration of the 
woods he w^ill have gone far to undo the evil of 
his sketches. A spirit once well strung up to the 
concert-pitch of the primeval out-of-doors will 
hardly dare to finish a study and magniloquently 
ticket it a pictvu-e. The incommunicable thrill of 
things, that is the tuning-fork by which we test the 
flatness of our art. Here it is that Nature teaches 
and condemns, and still spurs up to further effort 
and new failure. Thus it is that she sets us blush- 
ing at our ignorant and tepid works ; and the more 
we find of these inspiring shocks the less shall we 
be apt to love the literal in our productions. In all 
sciences and senses the letter kills; and to-day, 



FONTAINEBLEAU 143 

when cackling human geese express their igno- 
rant condemnation of all studio pictures, it is a 
lesson most useful to be learnt. Let the young 
painter go to Fontainebleau, and while he stupefies 
himself with studies that teach him the mechan- 
ical side of his trade, let him walk in the great air, 
and be a servant of mirth, and not pick and bot- 
anise, but wait upon the moods of nature. So he 
will learn — or learn not to forget — the poetry/ 
of life and earth, which, when he has acquired his 
track, will save him from joyless reproduction. 

[1882.] 



RANDOM MEMORIES 

I. THE COAST OF FIFE 

MANY writers have vigorously described 
the pains of the first day or the first 
night at school ; to a boy of any enter- 
prise, I believe, they are more often agreeably 
exciting. Misery — or at least misery unrelieved 
— is confined to another period, to the days of sus- 
pense and the " dreadful looking-for " of depart- 
ure; when the old life is running to an end, and 
the new life, with its new interests, not yet begun; 
and to the pain of an imminent parting, there is 
added the unrest of a state of conscious pre-exist- 
ence. The area-railings, the beloved shop-window, 
the smell of semi-suburban tanpits, the song of the 
church-bells upon a Sunday, the thin, high voices 
of compatriot children in a playing-field — what 
a sudden, what an overpowering pathos breathes 
to him from each familiar circumstance! The 



RANDOM MEMORIES 145 

assaults of sorrow come not from within, as it 
seems to him, but from without. I was proud 
and glad to go to school; had I been let alone, I 
could have borne up like any hero; but there was 
around me, in all my native town, a conspiracy of 
lamentation : " Poor little boy, he is going away 

— unkind little boy, he is going to leave us " ; so 
the unspoken burthen followed me as I went, with 
yearning and reproach. And at length, one mel- 
ancholy afternoon in the early autumn, and at a 
place where it seems to me, looking back, it must 
be always autumn and generally Sunday, there 
came suddenly upon the face of all I saw — the 
long empty road, the lines of the tall houses, the 
church upon the hill, the woody hillside garden 

— a look of such a piercing sadness that my 
heart died ; and seating myself on a door-step, 
I shed tears of miserable sympathy. A benevo- 
lent cat cumbered me the while with consola- 
tions — we two were alone in all that was visible 
of the London Road: two poor waifs who had 
each tasted sorrow — and she fawned upon the 
weeper, and gambolled for his entertainment, 



10 



146 RANDOM MEMORIES 

watching the effect, it seemed, with motherly 
eyes. 

For the sake of the cat, God bless her! I con- 
fessed at home the story of my weakness; and 
so it comes about that I owed a certain journey, 
and the reader owes the present paper, to a cat in 
the London Road. It was judged, if I had thus 
brimmed over on the public highway, some change 
of scene was (in the medical sense) indicated; my 
father at the time was visiting the harbour lights 
of Scotland; and it was decided he should take 
me along with him around a portion of the shores 
of Fife; my first professional tour, my first jour- 
ney in the complete character of man, without the 
help of petticoats. 

The Kingdom of Fife (that royal province) 
may be observed by the curious on the map, occu- 
pying a tongue of land between the firths of Forth 
and Tay. It may be continually seen from many 
parts of Edinburgh (among the rest, from the 
windows of my father's house) dying away into 
the distance and the easterly Jiaar with one smoky 
sea-side town beyond another, or in winter printing 



RANDOM MEMORIES 147 

on the grey heaven some gHttering hill-tops. It 
has no beauty to recommend it, being a low, sea- 
salted, wind-vexed promontory; trees very rare, 
except (as common on the east coast) along the 
dens of rivers; the fields well cultivated, I under- 
stand, but not lovely to the eye. It is of the coast 
I speak : the interior may be the garden of Eden. 
History broods over that part of the world like 
the easterly haar. Even on the map, its long row 
of Gaelic place-names bear testimony to an old 
and settled race. Of these little towns, posted 
along the shore as close as sedges, each with its bit 
of harbour, its old weather-beaten church or public 
building, its flavour of decayed prosperity and de- 
caying fish, not one but has its legend, quaint or 
tragic: Dunfermline, in whose royal towers the 
king may be still observed (in the ballad) drink- 
ing the blood-red wine; somnolent Inverkeithing, 
once the quarantine of Leith ; Aberdour, hard by 
the monastic islet of Inchcolm, hard by Donibristle 
where the " bonny face was spoiled " ; Burntisland, 
where, when Paul Jones was off the coast, the 
Reverend Mr. Shirra had a table carried between 



148 RANDOM MEMORIES 

tide-marks, and publicly prayed against the rover 
at the pitch of his voice and his broad lowland 
dialect ; Kinghorn, where Alexander " brak 's 
neckbane " and left Scotland to the English wars ; 
Kirkcaldy, where the witches once prevailed ex- 
tremely and sank tall snips and honest mariners 
in the North Sea ; Dysart, famous — well famous 
at least to me for the Dutch ships that lay in its 
harbour, painted like toys and with pots of flowers 
and cages of song-birds in the cabin windows, and 
for one particular Dutch skipper who would sit 
all day in slippers on the break of the poop, smok- 
ing a long German pipe; Wemyss (pronounce 
AVeems) with its bat-haunted caves, where the 
Chevalier Johnstone, on his flight from Culloden, 
passed a night of superstitious terrors; Leven, 
a bald, quite modern place, sacred to summer 
visitors, whence there has gone but yesterday the 
tall figure and the white locks of the last English- 
man in Delhi, my uncle Dr. Balfour, who was still 
walking his hospital rounds, while the troopers 
from Meerut clattered and cried " Deen, Deen " 
along the streets of the imperial city, and Wil- 



RANDOM MEMORIES 149 

longhby mustered his handful of heroes at the 
magazine, and the nameless brave one in the tele- 
graph office was perhaps already fingering his last 
despatch; and just a little beyond Leven, Largo 
Law and the smoke of Largo town mounting about 
its feet, the town of Alexander Selkirk, better 
known under the name of Robinson Crusoe. So 
on, the list might be pursued (only for private 
reasons, which the reader will shortly have an 
opportunity to guess) by St. Monance, and Pitten- 
weem, and the two Anstruthers, and Cellardyke, 
and Crail, where Primate Sharpe was once a 
humble and innocent country minister : on to the 
heel of the land, to Fife Ness, overlooked by a sea- 
w^ood of matted elders and the quaint old mansion 
of Balcomie, itself overlooking but the breach or 
the quiescence of the deep — the Carr Rock beacon 
rising close in front, and as night draws in, the star 
of the Inchcape reef springing up on the one hand, 
and the star of the A'lay Island on the o^her, and 
farther off yet a third and a greater on the craggy 
foreland of St. Abb's. And but a little way round 
the corner of the land, imminent itself above the 



150 RANDOM MEMORIES 

sea, stands the gem of the province and the Hght 
of mediaeval Scotland, St. Andrews, where the 
great Cardinal Beaton held garrison against the 
world, and the second of the name and title per- 
ished (as you may read in Knox's jeering narra- 
tive) under the knives of true-blue Protestants, 
and to this day (after so many centuries) the 
current voice of the professor is not hushed. 

Here it was that my first tour of inspection 
began, early on a bleak easterly morning. There 
Avas a crashing run of sea upon the shore, I rec- 
ollect, and my father and the man of the harbour 
light must sometimes raise their voices to be 
audible. Perhaps it is from this circumstance, 
that I always imagine St. Andrews to be an in- 
effectual seat of learning, and the sound of the 
east wind and the bursting surf to linger in its 
drowsy class-rooms and confound the utterance 
of the professor, until teacher and taught are alike 
drowned in oblivion, and only the sea-gull beats 
on the windows and the draught of the sea-air 
rustles in the pages of the open lecture. But 
upon all this, and the romance of St. Andrews in 



RANDOM MEMORIES 151 

general, the reader must consult the works of Mr. 
Andrew Lang ; who has written of it but the other 
day in his dainty prose and with his incommuni- 
cable humour, and long ago in one of his best 
poems, with grace, and local truth and a note of 
unaffected pathos. Mr. Lang knows all about the 
romance, I say, and the educational advantages, 
but I doubt if he had turned his attention to the 
harbour lights ; and it may be news even to him, 
that in the year 1863 their case was pitiable. 
Hanging about with the east wind humming in 
my teeth, and my hands (I make no doubt) in 
my pockets, I looked for the first time upon that 
tragi-comedy of the visiting engineer which I have 
seen so often re-enacted on a more important stage. 
Eighty years ago, I find my grandfather writing: 
'' It is the most painful thing that can occur to 
me to have a correspondence of this kind with any 
of the keepers, and when I come to the Light 
House, instead of having the satisfaction to meet 
them with approbation and welcome their Family, 
it is distressing when one is obliged to put on a 
most angry countenance and demeanour." This 



1^2 RANDOM MEMORIES 

painful obligation has been hereditary in my race. 
I have myself, on a perfectly amateur and unau- 
thorised inspection of Turnberry Point, bent my 
brows upon the keeper on the question of storm- 
panes ; and felt a keen pang of self-reproach, when 
we went down-stairs again and I found he was 
making a coffin for his infant child ; and then 
regained my equanimity with the thought that I 
had done the man a service, and when the proper 
inspector came, he would be readier with his panes. 
The human race is perhaps credited with more 
duplicity than it deserves. The visitation of a 
lighthouse at least is a business of the most trans- 
parent nature. As soon as the boat grates on the 
shore, and the keepers step forward in their uni- 
formed coats, the very slouch of the fellows' shoul- 
ders tells their story, and the engineer may begin 
at once to assume his " angry countenance." Cer- 
tainly the brass of the handrail will be clouded ; 
and if the brass be not immaculate, certainly all 
will be to match — the reflectors scratched, the 
spare lamp unready, the storm-panes in the store- 
house. If a light is not rather more than middling 



RANDOM MEMORIES 153 

good, it will be radically bad. Mediocrity (except 
in literature) appears to be unattainable by man. 
But of course the unfortunate of St. Andrews was 
only an amateur, he was not in the Service, he had 
no uniform coat, he was (I believe) a plumber by 
his trade and stood (in the mediaeval phrase) quite 
out of the danger of my father; but he had a 
painful interview for all that, and perspired 
extremely. 

From St. Andrews, we drove over Magus Muir. 
My father had announced we were " to post," and 
the phrase called up in my hopeful mind visions 
of top-boots and the pictures in Rowlandson's 
Dance of Death; but it was only a jingling cab that 
came to the inn door, such as I had driven in a 
thousand times at the low price of one shilling on 
the streets of Edinburgh. Beyond this disap- 
pointment, I remember nothing of that drive. It 
is a road I have often travelled, and of not one 
of these journeys do I remember any single trait. 
The fact has not been suffered to encroach on the 
truth of the imagination. I still see A^Tagus Muir 
two hundred years ago; a desert place, quite 



154 RANDOM MEMORIES 

uninclosed; in the midst, the primate's carriage 
fleeing at the gallop; the assassins loose-reined in 
pursuit, Burley Balfour, pistol in hand, among the 
first. No scene of history has ever written itself 
so deeply on my mind ; not because Balfour, that 
questionable zealot, was an ancestral cousin of 
my own ; not because of the pleadings of the vic- 
tim and his daughter; not even because of the 
live bum-bee that flew out of Sharpens 'bacco-box, 
thus clearly indicating his complicity with Satan ; 
nor merely because, as it was after all a crime 
of a fine religious flavour, it figured in Sunday 
books and afforded a grateful relief from Minis- 
tering Children or the Memoirs of Mrs. Katharine 
Winslowe. The figure that always fixed my atten- 
tion is that of Hackston of Rathillet, sitting in the 
saddle with his cloak about his mouth, and through 
all that long, bungling, vociferous hurly-burly, 
revolving privately a case of conscience. He would 
take no hand in tlie deed, because he had a private 
spite against the victim, and " that action " must 
be sullied with no suggestion of a worldly motive; 
on the other hand, " that action," in itself was 



RANDOM MEMORIES 155 

highly justified, he had cast in his lot with " the 
actors," and he must stay there, inactive but 
publicly sharing the responsibility. " You are 
a gentleman — you will protect me!" cried the 
wounded old man, crawling towards him. " I 
w^ill never lay a hand on you," said Hackston, 
and put his cloak about his mouth. It is an old 
temptation with me, to pluck away that cloak and 
see the face — to open that bosom and to read 
the heart. With incomplete romances about Hack- 
ston, the drawers of my youth were lumbered. I 
read him up in every printed book that I could lay 
my hands on. I even dug among the Wodrow 
manuscripts, sitting shamefaced in the very room 
where my hero had been tortured two centuries 
before, and keenly conscious of my youth in the 
midst of other and (as I fondly thought) more 
gifted students. All was vain : that he had passed 
a riotous nonage, that he was a zealot, that he 
twice displayed (compared wath his grotesque 
companions) some tincture of soldierly resolution 
and even of military common-sense, and that he 
figured memorably in the scene on Magus Muir, 



156 RANDOM MEMORIES 

so much and no more could I make out. But 
whenever I cast my eyes backward, it is to see him 
hke a landmark on the plains of history, sitting 
with his cloak about his mouth, inscrutable. How 
small a thing creates an immortality ! I do not 
think he can have been a man entirely common- 
place; but had he not thrown his cloak about his 
mouth, or had the witnesses forgot to chronicle 
the action, he would not thus have haunted the 
imagination of my boyhood, and to-day he would 
scarce delay me for a paragraph. An incident, at 
once romantic and dramatic, which at once awakes 
the judgment and makes a picture for the eye, 
how little do we realise its perdurable power! 
Perhaps no one does so but the author, just as none 
but he appreciates the influence of jingling words; 
so that he looks on upon life, with something of 
a covert smile, seeing people led by what they 
fancy to be thoughts and what are really the accus- 
tomed artifices of his own trade, or roused by what 
they take to be principles and are really picturesque 
effects. In a pleasant book about a school-class 
club. Colonel Fergusson has recently told a little 



RANDOM MEMORIES 157 

anecdote. A '' Philosophical Society " was formed 
by some Academy boys — among them. Colonel 
Fergnsson himself, Fleeming Jenkin, and Andrew 
Wilson, the Christian Buddhist and author of The 
Abode of Snozu. Before these learned pundits, 
one member laid the following ingenious prob- 
lem : " What would be the result of putting a 
pound of potassium in a pot of porter?" ''I 
should think there would be a number of inter- 
esting bi-products," said a smatterer at my elbow ; 
but for me the tale itself has a bi-product, and 
stands as a type of much that is most human. For 
this inquirer who conceived himself to burn with 
a zeal entirely chemical, was really immersed in a 
design of a quite different nature ; unconsciously 
to his own recently breeched intelligence, he was 
engaged in literature. Putting, pound, potassium, 
pot, porter ; initial p, mediant t — that was his 
idea, poor little boy! So with politics and that 
which excites men in the present, so with history 
and that which rouses them in the past : there lie 
at the root of what appears, most serious unsus- 
pected elements. The triple town of Anstruther 



158 RANDOM MEMORIES 

Wester, Anstruther Easter, and Cellardyke, all 
three Royal Burghs — or two Royal Burghs and 
a less distinguished suburb, I forget which — lies 
continuously along the sea-side, and boasts of 
either two or three separate parish churches, and 
either two or three separate harbours. These 
ambiguities are painful; but the fact is (although 
it argue me uncultured), I am but poorly posted 
upon Cellardyke. My business lay in the two 
Anstruthers. A tricklet of a stream divides them, 
spanned by a bridge ; and over the bridge at the 
time of my knowledge, the celebrated Shell House 
stood outpost on the west. This had been the 
residence of an agreeable eccentric; during his 
fond tenancy, he had illustrated the outer w^alls, 
as high (if I remember rightly) as the roof, with 
elaborate patterns and pictures, and snatches of 
verse in the vein of exegi monumentuni ; shells 
and pebbles, artfully contrasted and conjoined, 
had been his medium; and I like to think of him 
standing back upon the bridge, when all was 
finished, drinking in the general effect and (like 
Gibbon) already lamenting his employment. 



RANDOM MEMORIES 159 

The same bridge saw another sight in the seven- 
teenth century. Mr. Thomson, the '' curat " of 
Anstruther Easter, was a man highly obnoxious 
to the devout : in the first place, because he was 
a '' curat " ; in the second place, because he was a 
person of irregular and scandalous life; and in 
the third place, because he was generally suspected 
of dealings w^ith the Enemy of Man. These three 
disqualifications, in the popular literature of the 
time, go hand in hand; but the end of Mr. Thom- 
son was a thing quite by itself, and in the proper 
phrase, a manifest judgment. He had been at 
a friend's house in Anstruther Wester, where (and 
elsewhere, I suspect,) he had partaken of the 
bottle ; indeed, to put the thing in our cold modern 
way, the reverend gentleman was on the brink of 
delirium tremens. It was a dark night, it seems ; 
a little lassie came carrying a lantern to fetch the 
curate home ; and away they went down the street 
of Anstruther Wester, the lantern swinging a bit 
in the child's hand, the barred lustre tossing up 
and down along the front of slumbering houses, 
and Mr. Thomson not altogether steady on his 



i6o RANDOM MEMORIES 

legs nor (to all appearance) easy in his mind. The 
pair had reached the middle of the bridge when 
(as I conceive the scene) the poor tippler started 
in some baseless fear and looked behind him ; the 
child, already shaken by the minister's strange 
behaviour, started also ; in so doing, she would 
jerk the lantern ; and for the space of a moment 
the lights and the shadows would be all con- 
founded. Then it was that to the unhinged toper 
and the twittering child, a huge bulk of blackness 
seemed to sweep down, to pass them close by as 
they stood upon the bridge, and to vanish on the 
farther side in the general darkness of the night. 
'' Plainly the devil came for Mr. Thomson ! " 
thought the child. What Mr. Thomson thought 
himself, we have no ground of knowledge ; but 
he fell upon his knees in the midst of the bridge 
like a man praying. On the rest of the journey 
to the manse, history is silent ; but when they 
came to the door, the poor caitiff, taking the lan- 
tern from the child, looked upon her with so lost 
a countenance that her little courage died within 
her, and she fled home screaming to her parents. 



RANDOM MEMORIES i6i 

Not a soul would venture out; all that night, the 
minister dwelt alone with his terrors in the manse; 
and when the day dawned, and men made bold to 
go about the streets, they found the devil had come, 
indeed' for Mr. Thomson. 

This manse of Anstruther Easter has another 
and a more cheerful association. It was early in 
the morning, about a century before the days of 
Mr. Thomson, that his predecessor was called out 
of bed to welcome a Grandee of Spain, the Duke 
of Medina Sidonia, just landed in the harbour 
underneath. But sure there was never seen a 
more decayed grandee; sure there was never a 
duke welcomed from a stranger place of exile. 
Half-way between Orkney and Shetland, there 
lies a certain isle; on the one hand the Atlantic, 
on the other the North Sea, bombard its pillared 
cliffs; sore-eyed, short-living, inbred fishers and 
their families herd in its few huts; in the grave- 
yard pieces of wreck-wood stand for monuments; 
there is nowhere a more inhospitable spot. Belle- 
Isle-en-Mer — Fair-Isle-at-Sea — that is a name 

that has always rung in my mind's ear like music; 

II 



i62 RANDOM MEMORIES 

but the only ** Fair Isle " on which I ever set my 
foot, was this unhomely, rugged turret-top of sub- 
marine sierras. Here, when his ship was broken, 
my lord Duke joyfully got ashore; here for long 
months he and certain of his men were harboured ; 
and it was from this durance that he landed at last 
to be welcomed (as well as such a papist deserved, 
no doubt) by the godly incumbent of Anstruther 
Easter; and after the Fair Isle, what a fine city 
must that have appeared ! and after the island diet, 
what a hospitable spot the minister's table! And 
yet he must have lived on friendly terms with his 
outlandish hosts. For to this day there still sur- 
vives a relic of the long winter evenings when the 
sailors of the great Armada crouched about the 
hearths of the Fair-Islanders, the planks of their 
own lost galleon perhaps lighting up the scene, and 
the gale and the surf that beat about the coast con- 
tributing their melancholy voices. All the folk 
of the north isles are great artificers of knitting: 
the Fair-Islanders alone dye their fabrics in the 
Spanish manner. To this day, gloves and night- 
caps, innocently decorated, may be seen for sale 



RANDOM MEMORIES 163 

in the Shetland warehouse at Edinburgh, or on 
the Fair Isle itself in the catechist's house; and to 
this day, they tell the story of the Duke of Medina 
Sidonia's adventure. 

It would seem as if the Fair Isle had some at- 
traction for " persons of quality." When I landed 
there myself, an elderly gentleman, unshaved, 
poorly attired, his shoulders wrapped in a plaid, 
was seen walking to and fro, with a book in his 
hand, upon the beach. He paid no heed to our 
arrival, which we thought a strange thing in itself; 
but when one of the officers of the Pharos, passing 
narrowly by him, observed his book to be a Greek 
Testament, our wonder and interest took a higher 
flight. The catechist was cross-examined ; he said 
the gentleman had been put across some time be- 
fore in Mr. Bruce of Sumburgh's schooner, the 
only link between the Fair Isle and the rest of the 
world; and that he held services and was doing 
" good." So much came glibly enough; but when 
pressed a little farther, the catechist displayed em- 
barrassment. A singular diffidence appeared upon 
his- face: " They tell me," said he, in low tones, 



i64 RANDOM MEMORIES 

** that he's a lord." And a lord he was; a peer 
of the realm pacing that inhospitable beach with 
his Greek Testament, and his plaid about his 
shoulders, set upon doing good, as he understood 
it, worthy man ! And his grandson, a good- 
looking little boy, much better dressed than the 
lordly evangelist, and speaking with a silken Eng- 
lish accent very foreign to the scene, accompanied 
me for awhile in my exploration of the island. 
I suppose this little fellow is now my lord, and 
wonder how much he remembers of the Fair Isle. 
Perhaps not much; for he seemed to accept very 
quietly his savage situation ; and under such guid- 
ance, it is like that this was not his first nor yet 
his last adventure. 



RANDOM MEMORIES 

(^continued) 

II. THE EDUCATION OF AN ENGINEER 

Jl NSTRUTHER is a place sacred to the 
/^% Muse; she inspired (really to a consider- 
able extent) Tennant's vernacular poem 
Anst'er Fair; and I have there waited upon her 
myself with much devotion. This was when I 
came as a young man to glean engineering expe- 
rience from the building of the breakwater. What 
I gleaned, I am sure I do not know; but indeed 
I had already my own private determination to be 
an author; I loved the art of words and the 
appearances of life; and travellers, and headers, 
and rubble^ and polished ashlar, and pierres per- 
dues, and even the thrilling question of the string- 
course, interested me only (if they interested me at 
all) as properties for some possible romance or as 
words to add to my vocabulary. To grow a little 



i66 RANDOM MEMORJES 

catholic is the compensation of years; youth is 
one-eyed ; and in those days, though I haunted the 
breakwater by day, and even loved the place for the 
sake of the sunshine, the thrilling sea-side air, 
the wash of waves on the sea-face, the green glim- 
mer of the divers' helmets far below, and the 
musical chinking of the masons, my one genuine 
preoccupation lay elsewhere, and my only industry 
w^as in the hours when I was not on duty. I lodged 
with a certain Bailie Brown, a carpenter by trade; 
and there, as soon as dinner was despatched, in a 
chamber scented with dry rose-leaves, drew in my 
chair to the table and proceeded to pour forth liter- 
ature, at such a speed, and with such intimations of 
early death and immortality, as I now look back 
upon with wonder. Then it was that I wrote 
Voces Fiddkmi, a series of dramatic monologues 
in verse ; then that I indited the bulk of a covenant- 
ing novel — like so many others, never finished. 
Late I sat into the night, toiling (as I thought) 
under the very dart of death, toiling to leave a 
memory behind me. I feel moved to thrust aside 
the curtain of the years, to hail that poor feverish 



RANDOM MEMORIES 167 

idiot, to bid him go to bed and clap Voces Fidelium 
on the fire before he goes ; so clear does he appear 
before me, sitting there between his candles in the 
rose-scented room and the late night; so ridicu- 
lous a picture (to my elderly wisdom) does the 
fool present ! But he was driven to his bed at last 
without miraculous intervention ; and the manner 
of his driving sets the last touch upon this emi- 
nently youthful business. The weather was then 
so warm that I must keep the windows open ; the 
night without was populous with moths. As the 
late darkness deepened, my literary tapers bea- 
coned forth more brightly ; thicker and thicker 
came the dusty night-fliers, to gyrate for one 
brilliant instant round the flame and fall in agonies 
upon my paper. Flesh and blood could not endure 
the spectacle; to capture immortality was doubt- 
less a noble enterprise, but not to capture it at such 
a cost of suffering; and out would go the candles, 
and off would I go to bed in the darkness, raging 
to think that the blow might fall on the morrow, 
and there was Voces Fidelium still incomplete. 
Well, the moths are all gone, and Voces Fidelium 



i68 RANDOM MEMORIES 

along with them ; only the fool is still on hand and 
practises new follies. 

Only one thing in connection with the harbour 
tempted me, and that was the diving, an experience 
I burned to taste of. But this was not to be, at 
least in Anstruther; and the subject involves a 
change of scene to the subarctic town of Wick. 
You can never have dwelt in a country more un- 
sightly than that part of Caithness, the land faintly 
swelling, faintly falling, not a tree, not a hedgerow, 
the fields divided by single slate stones set upon 
their edge, the wind always singing in your ears 
and (down the long road that led nowhere) thrum- 
ming in the telegraph wires. Only as you ap- 
proached the coast was there anything to stir the 
heart. The plateau broke down to the North Sea 
in formidable cliffs, the tall out-stacks rose like 
pillars ringed about with surf, the coves were over- 
brimmed with clamorous froth, the sea-birds 
screamed, the wind sang in the thyme on the cliff's 
edge; here and there, small ancient castles toppled 
on the brim ; here and there, it was possible to dip 
into a dell of shelter, where you might lie and tell 



RANDOM MEMORIES 169 

yourself you were a little warm, and hear (near 
at hand) the whin-pods bursting in the afternoon 
sun, and (farther off) the rumour of the turbulent 
sea. As for Wick itself, it is one of the meanest 
of man's towns, and situate certainly on the baldest 
of God's bays. It lives for herring, and a strange 
sight it is to see (of an afternoon) the heights of 
Pulteney blackened by seaward-looking fishers, as 
when a city crowds to a review — or, as when bees 
have swarmed, the ground is horrible with lumps 
and clusters ; and a strange sight, and a beautiful, 
to see the fleet put silently out against a rising 
moon, the sea-line rough as a wood with sails, 
and ever and again and one after another, a boat 
flitting swiftly by the silver disk. This mass of 
fishers, this great fleet of boats, is out of all pro- 
portion to the town itself; and the oars are manned 
and the nets hauled by immigrants from the Long 
Island (as we call the outer Hebrides), who come 
for that season only, and depart again, if " the 
take " be poor, leaving debts behind them. In a 
bad year, the end of the herring fishery is there- 
fore an exciting time; fights are common, riots 



lyo RANDOM MEMORIES 

often possible; an apple knocked from a child's 
hand was once the signal for something like a war ; 
and even when I was there, a gunboat lay in the 
bay to assist the authorities. To contrary inter- 
ests, it should be observed, the curse of Babel is here 
added ; the Lews men are Gaelic speakers. Caith- 
ness has adopted English ; an odd circumstance, 
if you reflect that both must be largely Norsemen 
by descent. I remember seeing one of the strong- 
est instances of this division : a thing like a Punch- 
and-Judy box erected on the flat grave-stones of 
the churchyard ; from the hutch or proscenium — 
I know not what to call it — an eldritch-looking 
preacher laying down the law in Gaelic about some 
one of the name of Pozvl, whom I at last divined 
to be the apostle to the Gentiles ; a large congrega- 
tion of the Lews men very devoutly listening ; and 
on the outskirts of the crowd, some of the town's 
children (to whom the whole affair was Greek and 
Hebrew) profanely playing tigg. The same de- 
scent, the same country, the same narrow sect of the 
same religion, and all these bonds made very largely 
nugatory by an accidental difference of dialect! 



RANDOM MEMORIES 171 

Into the bay of Wick stretched the dark length 
of the unfinished breakwater, in its cage of open 
staging; the travellers (like frames of churches) 
over-plumbing all; and away at the extreme end, 
the divers toiling unseen on the foundation. On 
a platform of loose planks, the assistants turned 
their air-mills ; a stone might be swinging between 
wind and water; underneath the swell ran gaily; 
and from time to time, a mailed' dragon with a 
window-glass snout came dripping up the ladder. 
Youth is a blessed season after all; my stay at 
Wick was in the year of Voces Fideliuni and the 
rose-leaf room at Bailie Brown's; and already 
I did not care two straws for literary glory. Post- 
humous ambition perhaps requires an atmosphere 
of roses ; and the more rugged excitant of Wick 
east winds had made another boy of me. To go 
down in the diving-dress, that was my absorbing 
fancy; and with the countenance of a certain 
handsome scamp of a diver, Bob Bain by name, I 
gratified the whim. 

It was grey, harsh, easterly weather, the swell 
ran pretty high, and out in the open there were 



172 RANDOM MEMORIES 

" skipper's daughters," when I found myself at 
last on the diver's platform, twenty pounds of 
lead upon each foot and my whole person swollen 
w^ith ply and ply of woollen underclothing. One 
moment, the salt wind was whistling round my 
night-capped head; the next, I v/as crushed al- 
most double under the weight of the helmet. As 
. that intolerable burthen was laid upon me, I could 
have found it in my heart (only for shame's sake) 
to cry off from the whole enterprise. But it was 
too late. The attendants began to turn the hurdy- 
gurdy, and the air to whistle through the tube; 
some one screwed in the barred window of the 
vizor; and I was cut off in a moment from my 
fellow-men ; standing there in their midst, but 
quite divorced from intercourse : a creature deaf 
and dumb, pathetically looking forth upon them 
from a climate of his own. Except that I could 
move and feel, I was like a man fallen in a cata- 
lepsy. But time was scarce given me to realise 
my isolation; the weights were hung upon my 
back and breast, the signal rope was thrust into 
my unresisting hand ; and setting a twenty-pound 



RANDOM MEMORIES 173 

foot upon the ladder, I began ponderously to 
descend. 

Some twenty rounds below the platform, twilight 
fell. Looking up, I saw a low green heaven mot- 
tled with vanishing bells of white ; looking around, 
except for the weedy spokes and shafts of the 
ladder, nothing but a green gloaming, somewhat 
opaque but very restful and delicious. Thirty 
rounds lower, I stepped off on the pierres perdiies 
of the foundation; a dumb helmeted figure took 
me by the hand, and made a gesture (as I read 
it) of encouragement; and looking in at the crea- 
ture's window, I beheld the face of Bain. There 
we were, hand to hand and (when it pleased us) 
eye to eye; and either might have burst himself 
with shouting, and not a whisper come to his 
companion's hearing. Each, in his own little 
world of air, stood incommunicably separate. 

Bob had told me ere this a little tale, a five 
minutes' drama at the bottom of the sea, which 
at that moment possibly shot across my mind. He 
was down with another, settling a stone of the 
sea-wall. They had it well adjusted. Bob gave 



174 RANDOM MEMORIES 

the signal, the scissors were slipped, the stone set 
home ; and it was time to turn to something else. 
But still his companion remained bowed over the 
block like a mourner on a tomb, or only raised 
himself to make absurd contortions and mysteri- 
ous signs unknown to the vocabulary of the diver. 
There, then, these two stood for awhile, like the 
dead and the living; till there flashed a fortunate 
thought into Bob's mind, and he stooped, peered 
through the window of that other world, and be- 
lield the face of its inhabitant wet w4th streaming 
tears. Ah! the man was in pain! And Bob, 
glancing downward, saw what was the trouble : 
the block had been lowered on the foot of that 
unfortunate — he was caught alive at the bottom 
of the sea under fifteen tons of rock. 

That two men should handle a stone so heav}^ 
even swinging in the scissors, may appear strange 
to the inexpert. These must bear in mind the 
great density of the water of the sea, and the 
surprising results of transplantation to that me- 
dium. To understand a little what these are, and 
how a man's weight, so far from being an en- 



RANDOM MEMORIES 175 

cnmbrance, is the very ground of his agihty, was 
the chief lesson of my submarine experience. The 
knowledge came upon me by degrees. As I began 
to go forward with the hand of my estranged 
companion, a world of tumbled stones was visible, 
pillared with the weedy uprights of the staging: 
overhead, a flat roof of green : a little in front, 
the sea-wall, like an unfinished rampart. And 
presently in our upward progress, Bob motioned 
me to leap upon a stone ; I looked to see if he 
were possibly in earnest, and he only signed to 
me the more imperiously. Now the block stood 
six feet high; it would have been quite a leap 
to me unencumbered; with the breast and back 
weights, and the twenty pounds upon each foot, 
and the staggering load of the helmet, the thing 
was out of reason. I laughed aloud in my tomb ; 
and to prove to Bob how far he was astray, I 
gave a little impulse from my toes. Up I soared 
like a bird, my companion soaring at my side. As 
high as to the stone, and then higher, I pursued 
my impotent and empty flight. Even when the 
strong arm of Bob had checked my shoulders, my 



176 RANDOM MEMORIES 

heels continued their ascent ; so that I blew out 
sideways like an autumn leaf, and must be hauled 
in, hand over hand, as sailors haul in the slack 
of a sail, and propped upon my feet again like 
an intoxicated sparrow. Yet a little higher on the 
foundation, and we began to be affected by the 
bottom of the swell, running there like a strong 
breeze of wind. Or so I must suppose; for, safe 
in my cushion of air, I was conscious of no im- 
pact; only swayed idly like a weed, and was now 
borne helplessly abroad, and now swiftly — and 
yet with dream-like gentleness — impelled against 
my guide. So does a child's balloon divagate upon 
the currents of the air, and touch and slide off 
again from every obstacle. So must have ineffec- 
tually swung, so resented their inefficiency, those 
light crowds that followed the Star of Hades, and 
uttered exiguous voices in the land beyond Cocytus. 
There was something strangely exasperating, as 
well as strangely wearying, in these uncommanded 
evolutions. It is bitter to return to infancy, to be 
supported, and directed, and perpetually set upon 
your feet, by the hand of some one else. The air 



RANDOM MEMORIES 177 

besides, as it is supplied to you by the busy mil- 
lers on the platform, closes the eustachian tubes 
and keeps the neophyte perpetually swallowing, till 
his throat is grown so dry that he can swallow 
no longer. And for all these reasons — although 
I had a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy in my sur- 
roundings, and longed, and tried, and always failed, 
to lay hands on the fish that darted here and there 
about me, swift as humming-birds — yet I fancy 
I was rather relieved than otherwise when Bain 
brought me back to the ladder and signed to me 
to mount. And there was one more experience 
before me even then.f Of a sudden, my ascending 
head passed into the trough of a swell. Out of 
the green, I shot at once into a glory of rosy, 
almost of sanguine light — the multitudinous seas 
incarnadined, the heaven above a vault of crimson. 
And then the glory faded into the hard, ugly day- 
light of a Caithness autumn, with a low sky, a 
grey sea, and a whisthng wind. \ 

Bob Bain had five shillings for iMis trouble, and 
I had done what I desired. It was one of the best 

things I got from my education as an engineer: 

12 



lyS RANDOM MEMORIES 

of which however, as a way of Hfe, I wish to 
speak with sympathy. It takes a man into the 
open air; it keeps him hanging about harbour- 
sides, which is the richest form of icUing; it car- 
ries him to wild islands ; it gives him a taste of 
the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies him 
with dexterities to exercise; it makes demands 
upon his ingenuity; it will go far to cure him of 
any taste (if ever he had one) for the miserable 
life of cities. And when it has done so, it carries 
him back and shuts him in an office! From the 
roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing 
boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with 
a memory full of ships, and seas, and perilous 
headlands, and the shining pharos, he must apply 
his long-sighted eyes to the petty niceties of draw- 
ing, or measure his inaccurate mind w^th several 
pages of consecutive figures. He is a wise youth, 
to be sure, who can balance one part of genuine 
life against two parts of drudgery between four 
walls, and for the sake of the one, manfully accept 
the other. 

Wick was scarce an eligible place of stay. But 



RANDOM MEMORIES 179 

how much better it was to hang in the cold wind 
upon the pier, to go down with Bob Bain among 
the roots of the staging, to be all day in a boat 
coiling a wet rope and shouting orders — not al- 
ways very wise — than to be warm and dry, and 
dull, and dead-alive, in the most comfortable office. 
And Wick itself had in those days a note of 
originality. It may have still, but I misdoubt it 
much. The old minister of Keiss would not preach, 
in these degenerate times, for an hour and a half 
upon the clock. The gipsies must be gone from 
their caverns; where you might see, from the 
mouth, the women tending their fire, like Meg 
Merrilies, and the men sleeping off their coarse 
potations; and where in winter gales, the surf 
would beleaguer them closely, bursting in their 
very door. A traveller to-day upon the Thurso 
coach would scarce observe a little cloud of 
smoke among the moorlands, and be told, quite 
openly, it marked a private still. He w^ould not 
indeed make that journey, for there is now no 
Thurso coach. And even if he could, one little 
thing that happened to me could never happen 



i8o RANDOM MEMORIES 

to him, or not with the same trenchancy of 
contrast. 

We had been upon the road all evening; the 
coach-top was crowded with Lews fishers going 
home, scarce anything but Gaelic had sounded in 
my ears; and our way had lain throughout over 
a moorish country very northern to behold. Latish 
at night, though it was still broad day in our 
subarctic latitude, we came down upon the shores 
of the roaring Pentland Firth, that grave of mari- 
ners ; on one hand, the cliffs of Dunnet Head 
ran seaward; in front was the little bare, white 
town of Castleton, its streets full of blowing sand ; 
nothing beyond, but the North Islands, the great 
deep, and the perennial ice-fields of the Pole. And 
here, in the last imaginable place, there sprang up 
young outlandish voices and a chatter of some 
foreign speech ; and I saw, pursuing the coach 
with its load of Hebridean fishers — as they had 
pursued vettiirini up the passes of the Apennines 
or perhaps along the grotto under Virgil's tomb — 
two little dark-eyed, white-toothed Italian vaga- 
bonds, of twelve to fourteen years of age, one 



RANDOM MEMORIES i8i 

with a hurdy-gurdy, the other with a cage of 
white mice. The coach passed on, and their small 
Italian chatter died in the distance; and I was 
left to marvel how they had wandered into that 
country, and how they fared in it, and what they 
thought of it, and when (if ever) they should see 
again the silver wind-breaks run among the olives, 
and the stone-pine stand guard upon Etruscan 
sepulchres. 

Upon any American, the strangeness of this 
incident is somewhat lost. For as far back as he 
goes in his own land, he will find some alien 
camping there; the Cornish miner, the French or 
Mexican half-blood, the negro in the South, these 
are deep in the woods and far among the moun- 
tains. But in an old, cold, and rugged country 
such as mine, the days of immigration are long 
at an end; and away up there, which was at that 
time far beyond the northernmost extreme of rail- 
ways, hard upon the shore of that ill-omened strait 
of whirlpools, in a land of moors where no stran- 
ger came, unless it should be a sportsman to shoot 
grouse or an antiquary to decipher runes, the 



i82 RANDOM MEMORIES 

presence of these small pedestrians struck the 
mind as though a bird-of-paradise had risen from 
the heather or an albatross come fishing in the 
bay of Wick. They were as strange to their 
surroundings as my lordly evangelist or the old 
Spanish grandee on the Fair Isle. 



THE LANTERN-BEARERS 

I 

THESE boys congregated every autumn 
about a certain easterly fisher-village, 
where they tasted in a high degree the 
glory of existence. The place was created seem- 
ingly on purpose for the diversion of young gen- 
tlemen. A street or two of houses, mostly red 
and many of them tiled; a number of fine trees 
clustered about the manse and the kirkyard, and 
turning the chief street into a shady alley; many 
little gardens more than usually bright with 
flowers ; nets a-drying, and fisher-wives scolding 
in the backward parts ; a smell of fish, a genial 
smell of seaweed; whiffs of blowing sand at the 
street-corners; shops with golf-balls and bottled 
lollipops; another shop with penny pickwicks (that 
remarkable cigar) and the London Journal, dear 
to me for its startling pictures, and a few novels, 



i84 THE LANTERN-BEARERS 

dear for their suggestive names: such, as well as 
memory serves me, were the ingredients of the 
town. These, you are to conceive posted on a 
spit between tw^o sandy bays, and sparsely flanked 
with villas — enough for the boys to lodge in 
with their subsidiary parents, not enough (not yet 
enough) to cocknify the scene: a haven in the 
rocks in front : in front of that, a file of grey 
islets : to the left, endless links and sand-wreaths, 
a wilderness of hiding-holes, alive with popping 
rabbits and soaring gulls : to the right, a range 
of seaward crags, one rugged brow beyond an- 
other; the ruins of a mighty and ancient fortress 
on the brink of one ; coves between — now 
charmed into sunshine quiet, now whistling with 
wind and clamorous with bursting surges; the 
dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and 
southernwood, the air at the cliff's edge brisk and 
clean and pungent of the sea — in front of all, 
the Bass Rock, tilted seaward like a doubtful 
bather, the surf ringing it with white, the solan- 
geese hanging round its summit like a great and 
glittering smoke. This choice piece of seaboard 



THE LANTERN-BEARERS 185 

was sacred, besides, to the wrecker; and the Bass, 
in the eye of fancy, still flew the colours of King 
James ; and in the ear of fancy the arches of 
Tantallon still rang with horseshoe iron, and 
echoed to the commands of Bell-the-Cat. 

There was nothing to mar your days, if you 
were a boy summering in that part, but the em- 
barrassment of pleasure. You might golf if you 
wanted ; but I seem to have been better employed. 
You might secrete yourself in the Lady's Walk, 
a certain sunless dingle of elders, all mossed over 
by the damp as green as grass, and dotted here 
and there by the stream-side with roofless walls, 
the cold homes of anchorites. To fit themselves 
for life, and with a special eye to acquire the art 
of smoking, it was even common for the boys 
to harbour there; and you might have seen a 
single penny pickwick, honestly shared in lengths 
with a blunt knife, bestrew the glen with these 
apprentices. Again, you might join our fishing- 
parties, where we sat perched as thick as solan- 
geese, a covey of little anglers, boy and girl, 
angling over each other's heads, to the much en- 



i86 THE LANTERN-BEARERS 

tanglement of lines and loss of podleys and con- 
sequent shrill recrimination — shrill as the geese 
themselves. Indeed, had that been all, you might 
have done this often ; but though fishing be a 
fine pastime, the podley is scarce to be regarded 
as a dainty for the table; and it was a point of 
honour that a boy should eat all that he had 
taken. Or again, you might climb the Law, where 
the whale's jawbone stood landmark in the buzz- 
ing wind, and behold the face of many counties, 
and the smoke and spires of many towns, and the 
sails of distant ships. You might bathe, now in 
the flaws of fine weather, that we pathetically call 
our summer, now in a gale of wind, with the 
sand scourging your bare hide, your clothes thrash- 
ing abroad from underneath their guardian stone, 
the froth of the great breakers casting you head- 
long ere it had drowned your knees. Or you 
might explore the tidal rocks, above all in the 
ebb of springs, when the very roots of the hills 
were for the nonce discovered ; following my 
leader from one group to another, groping in slip- 
pery tangle for the wreck of ships, wading in 



THE LANTERN-BEARERS 187 

pools after the abominable creatures of the sea, 
and ever with an eye cast backward on the march 
of the tide and the menaced line of your retreat. 
And then you might go Crusoeing, a word that 
covers all extempore eating in the open air: dig- 
ging perhaps a house under the margin of the 
links, kindling a fire of the sea-ware, and cooking 
apples there — if they were truly apples, for I 
sometimes suppose the merchant must have played 
us off with some inferior and quite local fruit, 
capable of resolving, in the neighbourhood of fire, 
into mere sand and smoke and iodine; or per- 
haps pushing to Tantallon, you might lunch on 
sandwiches and visions in the grassy court, while 
the wind hummed in the crumbling turrets; or 
clambering along the coast, eat geans ^ (the worst, 
I must suppose, in Christendom) from an adven- 
turous gean-tree that had taken root under a cliff, 
where it was shaken with an ague of east wind, 
and silvered after gales with salt, and grew so 
foreign among its bleak surroundings that to eat 
of its produce was an adventure in itself. 

1 Wild cherries. 



i88 THE LANTERN-BEARERS 

There are mingled some dismal memories with 
so many that were joyous. Of the fisher-wife, 
for instance, who had cut her throat at Canty 
Bay ; and of how I ran with the other children 
to the top of the Quadrant, and beheld a posse 
of silent people escorting a cart, and on the cart, 
bound in a chair, her throat bandaged, and the 
bandage all bloody — horror ! — the fisher-wife 
herself, who continued thenceforth to hag-ride 
my thoughts, and even to-day (as I recall the 
scene) darkens daylight. She was lodged in the 
little old jail in the chief street ; but whether or 
no she died there, with a wise terror of the worst, 
I never inquired. She had been tippling; it was 
but a dingy tragedy; and it seems strange and 
hard that, after all these years, the poor crazy 
sinner should be still pilloried on her cart in the 
scrap-book of my memory. Nor shall I readily 
forget a certain house in the Quadrant where a 
visitor died, and a dark old woman continued to 
dwell alone with the dead body; nor how this old 
woman conceived a hatred to myself and one of 
my cousins, and in the dread hour of the dusk, 



THE LANTERN-BEARERS 189 

as we were clambering on the garden-walls, opened 
a window in that house of mortality and cursed 
us in a shrill voice and with a marrowy choice 
of language. It was a pair of very colourless 
urchins that fled down the lane from this re- 
markable experience! But I recall with a more 
doubtful sentiment, compounded out of fear and 
exultation, the coil of equinoctial tempests; trum- 
peting squalls, scouring flaws of rain ; the boats 
with their reefed lugsails scudding for the har- 
bour mouth, where danger lay, for it was hard 
to make when the wind had any east in it; the 
wives clustered with blowing shawls at the pier- 
head, where (if fate was against them) they might 
see boat and husband and sons — their whole 
wealth and their whole family — engulfed under 
their eyes; and (what I saw but once) a troop 
of neighbours forcing such an unfortunate home- 
ward, and she squalling and battling in their midst, 
a figure scarcely human, a tragic Maenad. 

These are things that I recall with interest; but 
what my memory dwells upon the most, I have 
been all this while withholding. It was a sport 



I90 THE LANTERN-BEARERS 

peculiar to the place, and indeed to a week or 
so of our two months' holiday there. Maybe it 
still flourishes in its native spot; for boys and 
their pastimes are swayed by periodic forces in- 
scrutable to man; so that tops and marbles reap- 
pear in their due season, regular like the sun and 
moon; and the harmless art of knucklebones has 
seen the fall of the Roman empire and the rise 
of the United States. It may still flourish in its 
native spot, but nowhere else, I am persuaded; 
for I tried myself to introduce it on Tweedside, 
and was defeated lamentably ; its charm being quite 
local, like a country wine that cannot be exported. 

The idle manner of it was this : — 

Toward the end of September, when school-time 
was drawing near and the nights were already 
black, we would begin to sally from our respec- 
tive villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lan- 
tern. The thing was so well known that it had 
worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain; 
and the grocers, about the due time, began to 
garnish their windows with our particular brand 
of luminary. We wore them buckled to the waist 



THE LANTERN-BEARERS 191 

upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the 
rigour of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They 
smelled noisomely of bhstered tin ; they never 
burned aright, though they would always burn 
our fingers; their use was naught; the pleasure 
of them merely fanciful ; and yet a boy with a 
bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing 
more. The fishermen used lanterns about their 
boats, and it was from them, I suppose, that we 
had got the hint; but theirs were not bull's-eyes, 
nor did we ever play at being fishermen. The 
police carried them at their belts, and we had 
plainly copied them in that; yet we did not pre- 
tend to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may 
have had some haunting thoughts of; and we 
had certainly an eye to past ages wdien lanterns 
w^ere more common, and to certain story-books in 
which we had found them to figure very largely. 
But take it for all in all, the pleasure of the thing 
was substantive; and to be a boy with a bulFs- 
eye under his top-coat was good enough for us. 

When two of these asses met, there would be 
an anxious '' Have you got your lantern ? " and 



192 THE LANTERN-BEARERS 

a gratified '' Yes ! " That was the shibboleth, and 
very needful too; for, as it was the rule to keep 
our glory contained, none could recognise a lan- 
tern-bearer, unless (like the pole-cat) by the smell. 
Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly 
of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts 
above them — for the cabin was usually locked, or 
choose out some hollow of the links where the 
w^ind might whistle overhead. There the coats 
would be unbuttoned and the bull's-eyes discovered ; 
and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge 
windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich 
steam of toasting tinware, these fortunate young 
gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand 
of the links or on the scaly bilges of the fishing- 
boat, and delight themselves with inappropriate 
talk. Woe is me that I may not give some speci- 
mens — some of their foresights of life, or deep 
inquiries into the rudiments of man and nature, 
these were so fiery and so innocent, they were 
so richly silly, so romantically young. But the 
talk, at any rate, was but a condiment; and these 
gatherings themselves only accidents in the career 



THE LANTERN-BEARERS 193 

of the lantern-bearer. The essence of this bhss 
was to walk by yourself in the black night; the 
slide shut, the top-coat buttoned; not a ray es- 
caping, wdiether to conduct your footsteps or to 
make your glory public: a mere pillar of dark- 
ness in the dark; and all the while, deep down 
in the privacy of your fool's heart, to know you 
had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to exult and 
sing over the knowledge. 

11 

It is said that a poet has died young in the 
breast of the most stolid. It may be contended, 
rather, that this (somewhat minor) bard in almost 
every case survives, and is the spice of life to his 
possessor. Justice is not done to the versatility 
and the unplumbed childishness of man's imagi- 
nation. His life from without may seem but a 
rude mound of mud; there will be some golden 
chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells de- 
lighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems 
to the observer, he will have some kind of a bull's- 
eye at his belt. 

13 



194 THE LANTERN-BEARERS 

It would be hard to pick out a career more 
cheerless than that of Dancer, the miser, as he 
figures in the '' Old Bailey Reports," a prey to 
the most sordid persecutions, the butt of his 
neighbourhood, betrayed by his hired man, his 
house beleaguered by the impish school-boy, and 
he himself grinding and fuming and impotently 
fleeing to the law against these pin-pricks. You 
marvel at first that any one should willingly pro- 
long a life so destitute of charm and dignity; and 
then you call to memory that had he chosen, had 
he ceased to be a miser, he could have been freed 
at once from these trials, and might have built 
himself a castle and gone escorted by a squadron. 
For the love of more recondite joys, which we 
cannot estimate, which, it may be, we should envy, 
the man had willingly foregone both comfort and 
I consideration. " His mind to him a kingdom 
was " ; and sure enough, digging into that mind, 
which seems at first a dust-heap, we unearth some 
priceless jewels. For Dancer must have had the 
love of power and the disdain of using it, a noble 
character in itself; disdain of many pleasures, a 



THE LANTERN-BEARERS 195 

chief part of what is commonly called wisdom; 
disdain of the inevitable end, that finest trait of 
mankind; scorn of men's opinions, another ele- 
ment of virtue; and at the back of all, a con- 
science just like yours and mine, whining like a 
cur, swindling like a thimble-rigger, but still 
pointing (there or thereabout) to some conven- 
tional standard. Here w^ere a cabinet portrait to 
which Hawthorne perhaps had done justice; and 
yet not Hawthorne either, for he was mildly 
minded, and it lay not in him to create for us 
that throb of the miser's pulse, his fretful energy 
of gusto, his vast arms of ambition clutching in 
he knows not what : insatiable, insane, a god with 
a muck-rake. Thus, at least, looking in the bosom 
of the miser, consideration detects the poet in the 
full tide of life, with more, indeed, of the poetic 
fire than usually goes to epics; and tracing that 
mean man about his cold hearth, and to and fro 
in his discomfortable house, spies within him a 
blazing bonfire of delight. And so with others, 
who do not live by bread alone, but by some 
cherished and perhaps fantastic pleasure; who are 



196 THE LANTERN-BEARERS 

meat salesmen to the external eye, and possibly 
to themselves are Shakespeares, Napoleons, or 
Beethovens; who have not one virtue to rub 
against another in the field of active life, and yet 
perhaps, in the life of contemplation, sit with the 
saints. We see them on the street, and we can 
count their buttons ; but Heaven knows in what 
they pride themselves! Heaven knows where they 
have set their treasure! 

There is one fable that touches very near the 
quick of life : the fable of the monk who passed 
into the woods, heard a bird break into song, 
hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself on 
his return a stranger at his convent gates; for he 
had been absent fifty years, and of all his com- 
rades there survived but one to recognise him. 
It is not only in the woods that this enchanter 
carols, though perhaps he is native there. He sings 
in the most doleful places. The miser hears him 
and chuckles, and the days are moments. With 
no more apparatus than an ill-smelling lantern I 
have evoked him on the naked links. All life that 
is not merely mechanical is spun out of two 



THE LANTERN-BEARERS 197 

strands : seeking for that bird and hearing him. 
And it is just this that makes Hfe so hard to value, 
and the dehght of each so incommunicable. And 
just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of 
those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung 
to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn 
the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find 
a picture of life in so far as it consists of mud and 
of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that 
which we are ashamed to remember and that 
which we are careless whether we forget; but of 
the note of that time-devouring nightingale we 
hear no news. 

The case of these writers of romance is most 
obscure. They have been boys and youths; they 
have lingered outside the window of the beloved, 
who was then most probably writing to some one 
else; they have sat before a sheet of paper, and 
felt themselves mere continents of congested 
poetry, not one line of which would flow; they 
have walked alone in the woods, they have walked 
in cities under the countless lamps ; they have been 
to sea, they have hated, they have feared, they have 



198 THE LANTERN-BEARERS 

longed to knife a man, and maybe done it; the 
wild taste of life has stung their palate. Or, if 
you deny them all the rest, one pleasure at least 
they have tasted to the full — their books are 
there to prove it — the keen pleasure of successful 
literary composition. And yet they fill the globe 
with volumes, whose cleverness inspires me with 
despairing admiration, and whose consistent falsity 
to all I care to call existence, with despairing 
wrath. If I had no better hope than to continue 
to revolve among the dreary and petty businesses, 
and to be moved by the paltry hopes and fears with 
which they surround and animate their heroes, I 
declare I would die now. But there has never an 
hour of mine gone quite so dully yet; if it were 
spent waiting at a railway junction, I would have 
some scattering thoughts, I could count some 
grains of memory, compared to which the whole 
of one of these romances seems but dross. 

These writers would retort (if I take them prop- 
erly) that this was very true; that it was the same 
w^ith themselves and other persons of (what they 
call) the artistic temperament; that in this we were 



THE LANTERN-BEARERS 199 

exceptional, and should apparently be ashamed of 
ourselves; but that our works must deal exclu- 
sively with (what they call) the average man, who 
was a prodigious dull fellow, and quite dead to all 
but the paltriest considerations. I accept the issue. 
We can only know others by ourselves. The artis- 
tic temperament (a plague on the expression!) 
does not make us different from our fellow-men, or 
it would make us incapable of writing novels ; and 
the average man (a murrain on the word!) is just 
like you and me, or he would not be average. It 
was Whitman who stamped a kind of Birmingham 
sacredness upon the latter phrase; but Whitman 
knew very well, and showed very nobly, that the 
average man was full of joys and full of a poetry 
of his own. And this harping on life's dulness 
and man's meanness is a loud profession of in- 
competence ; it is one of two things : the cry of 
the blind eye, / cannot see, or the complaint of the 
dumb tongue, / cannot niter. To draw a life with- 
out delights is to prove I have not realised it. To 
picture a man without some sort of poetry — 
well, it goes near to prove my case, for it shows 



200 THE LANTERN-BEARERS 

an author may have Httle enough. To see Dancer 
only as a dirty, old, small-minded, impotently 
fuming man, in a dirty house, besieged by Harrow 
boys, and probably beset by small attorneys, is to 
show myself as keen an observer as . . . the Har- 
row boys. But these young gentlemen (with a 
more becoming modesty) were content to pluck 
Dancer by the coat-tails; they did not suppose 
they had surprised his secret or could put him 
living in a book : and it is there my error would 
have lain. Or say that in the same romance — I 
continue to call these books romances, in the hope 
of giving pain — say that in the same romance, 
which now begins really to take shape, I should 
leave to speak of Dancer, and follow instead the 
Harrow boys ; and say that I came on some such 
business as that of my lantern-bearers on the links ; 
and described the boys as very cold, spat upon by 
flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all of 
which they were ; and their talk as silly and in- 
decent, which it certainly was. I might upon these 
lines, and had I Zola's genius, turn out, in a page 
or so, a gem of literary art, render the lantern-light 



THE LANTERN-BEARERS 201 

with the touches of a master, and lay on the in- 
decency with the ungrudging hand of love; and 
when all was done, what a triumph would my pic- 
ture be of shallowness and dulness ! how it would 
have missed the point ! how it would have belied 
the boys ! To the ear of the stenographer, the talk 
is merely silly and indecent; but ask the boys 
themselves, and they are discussing (as it is highly 
proper they should) the possibilities of existence. 
To the eye of the observer they are wet and cold 
and drearily surrounded; but ask themselves, and 
they are in the heaven of a recondite pleasure, the 
ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern. 

Ill 

For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is 
often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a 
mere accessory, like the lantern, it may reside, like 
Dancer's, in the mysterious inwards of psychology. 
It may consist with perpetual failure, and find 
exercise in the continued chase. It has so little 
bond with externals (such as the observer scribbles 
in his note-book) that it may even touch them 



202 THE LANTERN-BEARERS 

not ; and the man's true life, for which he consents 
to hve, he altogether in the field of fancy. The 
clergyman, in his spare hours, may be winning 
battles, the farmer sailing ships, the banker reap- 
ing triumph in the arts : all leading another life, 
plying another trade from that they chose; like 
the poet's housebuilder, who, after all is cased in 
stone, 

" By his fireside, as impotent fancy prompts, 
Rebuilds it to his liking." 

In such a case the poetry runs underground. The 
observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all 
abroad. For to look at the man is but to court 
deception. We shall see the trunk from which he 
draws his nourishment ; but he himself is above 
and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed 
through by winds and nested in by nightingales. 
And the true realism were that of the poets, to 
climb up after him like a squirrel, and catch some 
glimpse of the heaven for which he lives. And the 
true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the 
poets : to find out where joy resides, and give it a 
voice far beyond singing. 



THE LANTERN-BEARERS 203 

For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of 
the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the 
explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not 
the secret of the lanterns, the scene upon the links 
is meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly 
spectral unreality of realistic books. Hence, when 
we read the English realists, the incredulous won- 
der with which we observe the hero's constancy 
under the submerging tide of dulness, and how he 
bears up with his jibbing sweetheart, and endures 
the chatter of idiot girls, and stands by his whole 
unfeatured wilderness of an existence, instead of 
seeking relief in drink or foreign travel. Hence 
in the French, in that meat-market of middle-aged 
sensuality, the disgusted surprise with which w^e 
see the hero drift sidelong, and practically quite 
untempted, into every description of misconduct 
and dishonour. In each, we miss the personal 
poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow 
work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems 
to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead 
like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon 
into the colours of the sunset; each is true, each 



204 THE LANTERN-BEARERS 

inconceivable; for no man lives in the external 
truth, among salts and acids, but in the warm, 
phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the 
painted windows and the storied walls. 

Of this falsity we have had a recent example 
from a man who knows far better — Tolstoi's 
Powers of Darkness. Here is a piece full of force 
and truth, yet quite untrue. For before Mikita 
was led into so dire a situation he was tempted, and 
temptations are beautiful at least in part ; and a 
work which dwells on the ugliness of crime and 
gives no hint of any loveliness in the temptation, 
sins against the modesty of life, and even when a 
Tolstoi writes it, sinks to melodrama. The peas- 
ants are not understood; they saw their life in 
fairer colours; even the deaf girl was clothed in 
poetry for Mikita, or he had never fallen. And 
so, once again, even an Old Bailey melodrama, 
without some brightness of poetry and lustre of 
existence, falls into the inconceivable and ranks 
with fairy tales. 



THE LANTERN-BEARERS 205 

IV 

In nobler books we are moved with something 
Hke the emotions of Hfe; and this emotion is very 
variously provoked. We are so moved when Le- 
vine labours in the field, when Andre sinks beyond 
emotion, when Richard Feverel and Lucy Des- 
borough meet beside the river, when Antony, " not 
cowardly, puts off his helmet," when Kent has 
infinite pity on the dying Lear, when, in Dos- 
toieffsky's Despised mid Rejected, the uncom- 
plaining hero drains his cup of suffering and 
virtue. These are notes that please the great heart 
of man. Not only love, and the fields, and the 
bright face of danger, but sacrifice and death and 
unmerited suffering humbly supported, touch in us 
the vein of the poetic. We love to think of them, 
we long to try them, we are humbly hopeful that 
we may prove heroes also. 

We have heard, perhaps, too much of lesser 
matters. Here is the door, here is the open air. 
Itiir in mitiqiiam silvam. 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 

THE past is all of one texture — whether 
feigned or suffered — whether acted out 
in three dimensions, or only witnessed 
in that small theatre of the brain which we keep 
brightly lighted all night long, after the jets are 
down, and darkness and sleep reign undisturbed in 
the remainder of the body. There is no distinction 
on the face of our experiences ; one is vivid indeed, 
and one dull, and one pleasant, and another ago- 
nising to remember; but which of them is what 
we call true, and which a dream, there is not one 
hair to prove. The past stands on a precarious 
footing; another straw split in the field of meta- 
physic, and behold us robbed of it. There is scarce 
a family that can count four generations but lays 
a claim to some dormant title or some castle and 
estate: a claim not prosecutable in any court of 
law, but flattering to the fancy and a great alle- 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 207 

viation of idle hours. A man's claim to his own 
past is yet less valid. A paper might turn up (in 
proper story-book fashion) in the secret drawer 
of an old ebony secretary, and restore your family 
to its ancient honours, and reinstate mine in a 
certain West Indian islet (not far from St. Kitt's, 
as beloved tradition hummed in my young ears) 
which was once ours, and is now unjustly some one 
else's, and for that matter (in the state of the sugar 
trade) is not worth anything to anybody. I do 
not say that these revolutions are likely; only no 
man can deny that they are possible ; and the past, 
on the other hand, is lost for ever : our old days 
and deeds, our old selves, too, and the very world 
in which these scenes were acted, all brought down 
to the same faint residuum as a last night's dream, 
to some incontinuous images, and an echo in the 
chambers of the brain. Not an hour, not a mood, 
not a glance of the eye, can we revoke; it is all 
gone, past conjuring. And yet conceive us robbed 
of it, conceive that little thread of memory that we 
trail behind us broken at the pocket's edge ; and in 
what naked nullity should we be left! for we only 



2o8 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 

guide ourselves, and only know ourselves, by these 
air-painted pictures of the past. 

Upon these grounds, there are some among us 
who claimed to have lived longer and more richly 
than their neighbours; wdien they lay asleep they 
claim they were still active; and among the treas- 
ures of memory that all men review for their 
amusement, these count in no second place the 
harvests of their dreams. There is one of this 
kind whom I have in my eye, and whose case is 
perhaps unusual enough to be described. He was 
from a child an ardent and uncomfortable dreamer. 
When he had a touch of fever at night, and the 
room swelled and shrank, and his clothes, hang- 
ing on a nail, now loomed up instant to the big- 
ness of a church, and now drew away into a 
horror of infinite distance and infinite littleness, 
the poor soul was very well aware of what must 
follow, and struggled hard against the approaches 
of that slumber which was the beginning of sor- 
rows. But his struggles were in vain ; sooner 
or later the night-hag would have him by the 
throat, and pluck him, strangling and screaming, 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 209 

from his sleep. His dreams were at times common- 
place enough, at times very strange : at times they 
were almost formless, he would be haunted, for 
instance, by nothing more definite than a certain 
hue of brown, which he did not mind in the least 
while he was awake, but feared and loathed while 
he was dreaming; at times, again, they took on 
every detail of circumstance, as when once he 
supposed he must swallow the populous world, and 
awoke screaming with the horror of the thought. 
The two chief troubles of his very narrow exist- 
ence — the practical and everyday trouble of school 
tasks and the ultimate and airy one of hell and 
judgment — were often confounded together into 
one appalling nightmare. He seemed to himself 
to stand before the Great White Throne; he was 
called on, poor little devil, to recite some form 
of words, on which his destiny depended; his 
tongue stuck, his memory was blank, hell gaped 
for him; and he would awake, clinging to the 
curtain-rod with his knees to his chin. 

These were extremely poor experiences, on the 

whole; and at that time of life my dreamer 

14 



2IO A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 

would have very willingly parted with his power 
of dreams. But presently, in the course of his 
growth, the cries and physical contortions passed 
away, seemingly for ever; his visions were still 
for the most part miserable, but they were more 
constantly supported; and he would awake with 
no more extreme symptom than a flying heart, a 
freezing scalp, cold sweats, and the speechless 
midnight fear. His dreams, too, as befitted a 
mind better stocked with particulars, became more 
circumstantial, and had more the air and con- 
tinuity of life. The look of the world beginning 
to take hold on his attention, scenery came to 
play a part in his sleeping as well as in his wak- 
ing thoughts, so that he would take long, unevent- 
ful journeys and see strange towns and beautiful 
places as he lay in bed. And, what is more sig- 
nificant, an odd taste that he had for the Georgian 
costume and for stories laid in that period of 
English history, began to rule the features of his 
dreams ; so that he masqueraded there in a three- 
cornered hat, and was much engaged with Jacobite 
conspiracy between the hour for bed and that for 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 211 

breakfast. About the same time, he began to 
read in his dreams — tales, for the most part, and 
for the most part after the manner of G. P. R. 
James, but so incredibly more vivid and moving 
than any printed book, that he has ever since been 
malcontent with literature. 

And then, while he was yet a student, there 
came to him a dream-adventure which he has no 
anxiety to repeat; he began, that is to say, to 
dream in sequence and thus to lead a double life 
— one of the day, one of the night — one that 
he had every reason to believe was the true one, 
another that he had no means of proving to be 
false. I should have said he studied, or was by 
way of studying, at Edinburgh College, which (it 
may be supposed) was how I came to know him. 
Well, in his dream life, he passed a long day in 
the surgical theatre, his heart in his mouth, his 
teeth on edge, seeing monstrous malformations 
and the abhorred dexterity of surgeons. In a 
heavy, rainy, foggy evening he came forth into 
the South Bridge, turned up the High Street, 
and entered the door of a tall land, at the top of 



212 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 

which he supposed himself to lodge. All night 
long, in his wet clothes, he climbed the stairs, 
stair after stair in endless series, and at every 
second flight a flaring lamp with a reflector. All 
night long, he brushed by single persons passing 
downward — beggarly women of the street, great, 
weary, muddy labourers, poor scarecrows of men, 
pale parodies of women — but all drowsy and 
weary like himself, and all single, and all brush- 
ing against him as they passed. In the end, out 
of a northern window, he would see day begin- 
ning to whiten over the Firth, give up the ascent, 
turn to descend, and in a breath be back again 
upon the streets, in his wet clothes, in the wet, 
haggard dawn, trudging to another day of mon- 
strosities and operations. Time went quicker in 
the life of dreams, some seven hours (as near as 
he can guess) to one; and it went, besides, more 
intensely, so that the gloom of these fancied ex- 
periences clouded the day, and he had not shaken 
off their shadow ere it was time to lie down and 
to renew them. I cannot tell how long it was 
that he endured this discipline; but it was long 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 213 

enough to leave a great black blot upon his mem- 
ory, long enough to send him, trembling for his 
reason, to the doors of a certain doctor; where- 
upon with a simple draught he was restored to 
the common lot of man. 

The poor gentleman has since been troubled by 
nothing of the sort; indeed, his nights were for 
some while like other men's, now blank, now 
chequered with dreams, and these sometimes 
charming, sometimes appalling, but except for an 
occasional vividness, of no extraordinary kind. 
I will just note one of these occasions, ere I pass 
on to what makes my dreamer truly interesting. 
It seemed to him that he was in the first floor 
of a rough hill-farm. The room showed some 
poor efforts at gentility, a carpet on the floor, 
a piano, I think, against the wall; but, for all 
these refinements, there was no mistaking he was 
in a moorland place, among hillside people, and 
set in miles of heather. He looked down from 
the window upon a bare farmyard, that seemed 
to have been long disused. A great, uneasy still- 
ness lay upon the world. There was no sign of 



214 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 

the farm-folk or of any live-stock, save for an 
old, brown, curly dog of the retriever breed, who 
sat close in against the wall of the house and 
seemed to be dozing. Something about this dog 
disquieted the dreamer; it was quite a nameless 
feeling, for the beast looked right enough — in- 
deed, he was so old and dull and dusty and 
broken dowai, that he should rather have awak- 
ened pity; and yet the conviction came and grew 
upon the dreamer that this was no proper dog at 
all, but something hellish. A great many dozing 
summer flies hummed about the yard; and pres- 
ently the dog thrust forth his paw, caught a fly 
in his open palm, carried it to his mouth like an 
ape, and looking suddenly up at the dreamer in 
the window, w^inked to him with one eye. The 
dream went on, it matters not how it went; it 
was a good dream as dreams go; but there was 
nothing in the sequel worthy of that devilish 
brown dog. And the point of interest for me lies 
partly in that very fact : that having found so 
singular an incident, my imperfect dreamer should 
prove unable to carry the tale to a fit end and 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 215 

fall back on indescribable noises and indiscrimi- 
nate horrors. It would be different now; he 
knows his business better! 

For, to approach at last the point : This honest 
fellow had long been in the custom of setting 
himself to sleep with tales, and so had his father 
before him; but these were irresponsible inven- 
tions, told for the teller's pleasure, with no eye 
to the crass public or the thwart reviewer : tales 
wiiere a thread might be dropped, or one adven- 
ture quitted for another, on fancy's least sugges- 
tion. So that the little people who manage man's 
internal theatre had not as yet received a very 
rigorous training; and played upon their stage 
like children who should have slipped into the 
house and found it empty, rather than like drilled 
actors performing a set piece to a huge hall of 
faces. But presently my dreamer began to turn 
his former amusement of story-telling to (what 
is called) account; by which I mean that he 
began to write and sell his tales. Here was he, 
and here were the little people who did that part 
of his business, in quite new conditions. The 



2i6 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 

stories must now be trimmed and pared and set 
upon all fours, they must run from a beginning 
to an end and fit (after a manner) with the laws 
of life; the pleasure, in one word, had become 
a business ; and that not only for the dreamer, 
but for the little people of his theatre. These 
understood the change as well as he. When he 
lay down to prepare himself for sleep, he no 
longer sought amusement, but printable and profit- 
able tales; and after he had dozed off in his 
box-seat, his little people continued their evolu- 
tions with the same mercantile designs. All other 
forms of dream deserted him but two: he still 
occasionally reads the most delightful books, he 
still visits at times the most delightful places; 
and it is perhaps worthy of note that to these 
same places, and to one in particular, he returns 
at intervals of months and years, finding new 
field-paths, visiting new neighbours, beholding that 
happy valley under new effects of noon and dawn 
and sunset. But all the rest of the family of visions 
is quite lost to him : the common, mangled ver- 
sion of yesterday's affairs, the raw-head-and- 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 217 

bloody-bones nightmare, rumoured to be the child 
of toasted cheese — these and their like are gone; 
and, for the most part, whether awake or asleep, 
he is simply occupied — he or his little people — 
in consciously making stories for the market. This 
dreamer (like many other persons) has encoun- 
tered some trifling vicissitudes of fortune. When 
the bank begins to send letters and the butcher 
to linger at the back gate, he sets to belabouring 
his brains after a story, for that is his readiest 
money-winner; and, behold! at once the little 
people begin to bestir themselves in the same 
quest, and labour all night long, and all nigli^t 
long set before him truncheons of tales upon their 
lighted theatre. No fear of his being frightened 
now; the flying heart and the frozen scalp are 
things by-gone ; applause, growing applause, grow- 
ing interest, growing exultation in his own clever- 
ness (for he takes all the credit), and at last a 
jubilant leap to wakefulness, w^ith the cry, " I have 
it, that '11 do ! " upon his lips : with such and simi- 
lar emotions he sits at these nocturnal dramas, 
with such outbreaks, like Claudius in the play, he 



2i8 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 

scatters the performance in the midst. Often 
enough the waking is a disappointment : he has 
been too deep asleep, as I explain the thing; 
drowsiness has gained his little people, they have 
gone stumbling and maundering through their 
parts ; and the play, to the awakened mind, is 
seen to be a tissue of absurdities. And yet how 
often have these sleepless Brownies done him 
honest service, and given him, as he sat idly tak- 
ing his pleasure in the boxes, better tales than he 
could fashion for himself. 

Here is one, exactly as it came to him. It 
seemed he was the son of a very rich and wicked 
man, the owner of broad acres and a most dam- 
nable temper. The dreamer (and that was the 
son) had lived much abroad, on purpose to avoid 
his parent; and when at length he returned to 
England, it w^as to find him married again to a 
young wife, who was supposed to suffer cruelly 
and to loathe her yoke. Because of this marriage 
(as the dreamer indistinctly understood) it was 
desirable for father and son to have a meeting; 
and yet both being proud and both angry, neither 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 219 

would condescend upon a visit. Meet they did 
accordingly, in a desolate, sandy country by the 
sea; and there they quarrelled, and the son, stung 
by some intolerable insult, struck down the father 
dead. No suspicion was aroused; the dead man 
was found and buried, and the dreamer succeeded 
to the broad estates, and found himself installed 
under the same roof with his father's widow, for 
whom no provision had been made. These two 
lived very much alone, as people may after a be- 
reavement, sat down to table together, shared the 
long evenings, and grew daily better friends ; 
until it seemed to him of a sudden that she was 
prying about dangerous matters, that she had 
conceived a notion of his guilt, that she watched 
him and tried hirn with questions. He drew back 
from her company as men draw back from a 
precipice suddenly discovered; and yet so strong 
was the attraction that he would drift again and 
again into the old intimacy, and again and again 
be startled back by some suggestive question or 
some inexplicable meaning in her eye. So they 
lived at cross purposes, a life full of broken dia- 



220 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 

logue, challenging glances, and suppressed passion ; 
until, one day, he saw the woman slipping from 
the house in a veil, followed her to the station, 
followed her in the train to the sea-side country, 
and out over the sand-hills to the very place where 
the murder was done. There she began to grope 
among the bents, he watching her, flat upon his 
face; and presently she had something in her 
hand — I cannot remember what it was, but it 
was deadly evidence against the dreamer — and 
as she held it up to look at it, perhaps from the 
shock of the discovery, her foot slipped, and she 
hung at some peril on the brink of the tall sand- 
wreaths. He had no thought but to spring up 
and rescue her; and there they stood face to 
face, she with that deadly matter openly in her 
hand — his very presence on the spot another 
link of proof. It was plain she was about to 
speak, but this was more than he could bear — 
he could bear to be lost, but not to talk of it 
with his destroyer; and he cut her short with 
trivial conversation. ' Arm in arm, they returned 
together to the train, talking he knew not what, 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 221 

made the journey back in the same carriage, sat 
down to dinner, and passed the evening in the 
drawing-room as in the past. But suspense and 
fear drummed in the dreamer's bosom. ^' She has 
not denounced me yet " — so his thoughts ran — 
" when win she denounce me ? Will it be to- 
morrow ? " And it was not to-morrow, nor the 
next day, nor the next ; and their life settled 
back on the old terms, only that she seemed 
kinder than before, and that, as for him, the 
burthen of his suspense and wonder grew daily 
more unbearable, so that he wasted away like a 
man with a disease. Once, indeed, he broke all 
bounds of decency, seized an occasion when she 
was abroad, ransacked her room, and at last, 
hidden away among her jewels, found the damn- 
ing evidence. There he stood, holding this thing, 
which was his life, in the hollow of his hand, and 
marvelling at her inconsequent behaviour, that she 
should seek, and keep, and yet not use it; and 
then the door opened, and behold herself. So, 
once more, they stood, eye to eye, with the evi- 
dence between them ; and once more she raised 



222 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 

to him a face brimming with some communica- 
tion ; and once more he shied away from speech 
and cut her off. But before he left the room, 
which he had turned upside down, he laid back 
his death-warrant where he had found it; and at 
that, her face lighted up. The next thing he 
heard, she was explaining to her maid, with some 
ingenious falsehood, the disorder of her things. 
Flesh and blood could bear the strain no longer; 
and I think it was the next morning (though 
chronology is always hazy in the theatre of the 
mind) that he burst from his reserve. They had 
been breakfasting together in one corner of a 
great, parqueted, sparely furnished room of many 
windows; all the time of the meal she had tor- 
tured him with sly allusions; and no sooner were 
the servants gone, and these two protagonists alone 
together, than he leaped to his feet. She too 
sprang up, with a pale face; with a pale face, 
she heard him as he raved out his complaint: 
Why did she torture him so? she knew all, she 
knew he was no enemy to her; why did she not 
denounce him at once? what signified her whole 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 223 

behaviour? why did she torture him? and yet 
again, why did she torture him? And when he 
had done, she fell upon her knees, and with out- 
stretched hands : " Do you not understand ? " she 
cried. *' I love you! " 

Hereupon, with a pang of w^onder and mercan- 
tile delight, the dreamer awoke. His mercantile 
delight was not of long endurance; for it soon 
became plain that in this spirited tale there were 
unmarketable elements; which is just the reason 
why you have it here so briefly told. But his won- 
der has still kept growing ; and I think the reader's 
will also, if he consider it ripely. For now he sees 
why I speak of the little people as of substantive 
inventors and performers. To the end they had 
kept their secret. I will go bail for the dreamer 
(having excellent grounds for valuing his can- 
dour) that he had no guess whatever at the motive 
of the woman — the hinge of the whole well- 
invented plot — until the instant of that highly 
dramatic declaration. It was not his tale; it was 
the little people's! And observe: not only was the 
secret kept, the story was told with really guileful 



224 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 

craftsmanship. The conduct of both actors is (in 
the cant phrase) psychologically correct, and the 
emotion aptly graduated up to the surprising cli- 
max. I am awake now, and I know this trade; 
and yet I cannot better it. I am awake, and I live 
by this business ; and yet I could not outdo — could 
not perhaps equal — that crafty artifice (as of 
some old, experienced carpenter of plays, some 
Dennery or Sardou) by which the same situation 
is twice presented and the two actors twice brought 
face to face over the evidence, only once it is in 
her hand, once in his — and these in their due 
order, the least dramatic first. The more I think 
of it, the more I am moved to press upon the world 
my question: Who are the Little People? They 
are near connections of the dreamer's, beyond 
doubt ; they share in his financial worries and have 
an eye to the bank-book; they share plainly in his 
training; they have plainly learned like him to 
build the scheme of a considerate story and to 
arrange emotion in progressive order ; only I think 
they have more talent ; and one thing is beyond 
doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece, like 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 225 

a serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of 
where they aim. Who are they, then? and who is 
the dreamer? 

Well, as regards the dreamer, I can answer that, 
for he is no less a person than myself ; — as I 
might have told you from the beginning, only that 
the critics murmur over my consistent egotism; 
— and as I am positively forced to tell you now, 
or I could advance but little farther with my story. 
And for the Little People, wdiat shall I say they 
are but just my Brownies, God bless them! who 
do one-half my work for me while I am fast asleep, 
and in all human likelihood, do the rest for me 
as well, when I am wide aw^ake and fondly suppose 
I do it for myself. That part which is done while 
I am sleeping is the Brownies' part beyond con- 
tention ; but that which is done when I am up and 
about is by no means necessarily mine, since all 
goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even 
then. Here is a doubt that much concerns my con- 
science. For myself — what I call I, my con- 
science ego, the denizen of the pineal gland unless 

he has changed his residence since Descartes, the 

15 



226 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 

man with the conscience and the variable bank- 
account, the man with the hat and the boots, and 
the privilege of voting and not carrying his candi- 
date at the general elections — I am sometimes 
tempted to suppose he is no story-teller at all, but 
a creature as matter of fact as any cheesemonger 
or any cheese, and a realist bemired up to the ears 
in actuality ; so that, by that account, the whole 
of my published fiction should be the single-handed 
product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some 
unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back 
garret, while I get all the praise and he but a share 
(which I cannot prevent him getting) of the pud- 
ding. I am an excellent adviser, something like 
Moliere's servant; I pull back and I cut down; 
and I dress the whole in the best words and sen- 
tences that I can find and make; I hold the pen, 
too; and I do the sitting at the table, which is 
about the worst of it; and when all is done, I 
make up the manuscript and pay for the registra- 
tion ; so that, on the whole, I have some claim to 
share, though not so largely as I do, in the profits 
of our common enterprise. 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 227 

I can but give an instance or so of what part is 
done sleeping and what part awake, and leave the 
reader to share what laurels there are, at his own 
nod, between myself and my collaborators ; and 
to do this I will first take a book that a number of 
persons have been polite enough to read, the 
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I had 
long been trying to write a story on this subject, 
to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of 
man's double being which must at times come in 
upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking 
creature. I had even written one, The Travelling 
Companion, which was returned by an editor on 
the plea that it was a work of genius and indecent, 
and which I burned the other day on the ground 
that it was not a work of genius, and that Jekyll 
had supplanted it. Then came one of those finan- 
cial fluctuations to which (with an elegant mod- 
esty) I have hitherto referred in the third person. 
For two days I went about racking my brains for 
a plot of any sort; and on the second night I 
dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene 
afterwards split in two, in which Hyde, pursued 



228 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 

for some crime, took the powder and underwent 
the change in the presence of his pursuers. All 
the rest w^as made awake, and consciously, al- 
though I think I can trace in much of it the man- 
ner of my Brownies. The meaning of the tale is 
therefore mine, and had long pre-existed in my 
garden of Adonis, and tried one body after another 
in vain ; indeed, I do most of the morality, worse 
luck! and my Brownies have not a rudiment of 
what we call a conscience. Mine, too, is the set- 
ting, mine the characters. All that was given me 
was the matter of three scenes, and the central 
idea of a voluntary change becoming involuntary. 
Will it be thought ungenerous, after I have been 
so liberally ladling out praise to my unseen col- 
laborators, if I here toss them over, bound hand 
and foot, into the arena of the critics? For the 
business of the powders, w^hich so many have cen- 
sured, is, I am relieved to say, not mine at all but 
the Brownies'. Of another tale, in case the reader 
should have glanced at it, I may say a word : the 
not very defensible story of Olalla. Here the 
court, the mother, the mother's niche, Olalla, 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 229 

Olalla's chamber, the meetings on the stair, the 
broken window, the ugly scene of the bite, were all 
given me in bulk and detail as I have tried to 
write them; to this I added only the external 
scenery (for in my dream I never was beyond the 
court), the portrait, the characters of Felipe and 
the priest, the moral, such as it is, and the last 
pages, such as, alas ! they are. And I may even 
say that in this case the moral itself was given me ; 
for it arose immediately on a comparison of the 
mother and the daughter, and from the hideous 
trick of atavism in the first. Sometimes a para- 
bolic sense is still more undeniably present in a 
dream ; sometimes I cannot but suppose my 
Brownies have been aping Bunyan, and yet in no 
case with what would possibly be called a moral 
in a tract ; never with the ethical narrowness ; 
conveying hints instead of life's larger limitations 
and that sort of sense which we seem to perceive 
in the arabesque of time and space. 

For the most part, it will be seen, my Brownies 
are somewhat fantastic, like their stories hot and 
hot, full of passion and the picturesque,- alive with 



230 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 

animating incident; and they have no prejudice 
against the supernatural. But the other day they 
gave me a surprise, entertaining me with a love- 
story, a little April comedy, which I ought cer- 
tainly to hand over to the author of A Chance 
Acquaintance, for he could write it as it should 
be written, and I am sure (although I mean to try) 
that I cannot. — But who would have supposed 
that a Brownie of mine should invent a tale for 
Mr. Howells? 



BEGGARS 



IN a pleasant, airy, up-hill country, it was my 
fortune when I was young to make the ac- 
quaintance of a certain beggar. I call him 
beggar, though he usually allowed his coat and his 
shoes (which were open-mouthed, indeed) to beg 
for him. He was the wreck of an athletic man, 
tall, gaunt, and bronzed ; far gone in consumption, 
with that disquieting smile of the mortally stricken 
on his face; but still active afoot, still with the 
brisk military carriage, the ready military salute. 
Three ways led through this piece of country ; and 
as I was inconstant in my choice, I believe he must 
often have awaited me in vain. But often enough, 
he caught me; often enough, from some place of 
ambush by the roadside, he would spring suddenly 
forth in the regulation attitude, and launching at 
once into his inconsequential talk, fall into step 



232 BEGGARS 

with me upon my farther course. " A fine morn- 
ing, sir, though perhaps a trifle incHning to rain. 
I hope I see you well, sir. Why, no, sir, I don't 
feel as hearty myself as I could wish, but I am 
keeping about my ordinary. I am pleased to meet 
you on the road, sir. I assure you I quite look 
forward to one of our little conversations." He 
loved the sound of his own voice inordinately, and 
though (with something too off-hand to call ser- 
vility) he would always hasten to agree with any- 
thing you said, yet he could never suffer you to 
say it to an end. By what transition he slid to his 
favourite subject I have no memory ; but we had 
never been long together on the way before he was 
dealing, in a very military manner, with the Eng- 
lish poets. " Shelley was a fine poet, sir, though 
a trifle atheistical in his opinions. His Queen Mab, 
sir, is quite an atheistical work. Scott, sir, is not 
so poetical a writer. With the works of Shake- 
speare I am not so well acquainted, but he was a 
fine poet. Keats — John Keats, sir — he was a 
very fine poet." With such references, such trivial 
criticism, such loving parade of his own knowledge. 



BEGGARS 233 

he would beguile the road, striding forward up- 
hill, his staff now clapped to the ribs of his deep, 
resonant chest, now swinging in the air with the 
remembered jauntiness of the private soldier; and 
all the while his toes looking out of his boots, 
and his shirt looking out of his elbows, and death 
looking out of his smile, and his big, crazy frame 
shaken by accesses of cough. 

He would often go the whole way home with 
me : often to borrow a book, and that book always 
a poet. Off he would march, to continue his men- 
dicant rounds, with the volume slipped into the 
pocket of his ragged coat; and although he would 
sometimes keep it quite awhile, yet it came always 
back again at last, not much the worse for its 
travels into beggardom. And in this way, doubt- 
less, his knowledge grew and his glib, random 
criticism took a wider range. But my library was 
not the first he had drawn upon : at our first en- 
counter, he was already brimful of Shelley and the 
atheistical Queen Mab, and '' Keats — John Keats, 
sir." And I have often wondered how he came 
by these accjuirements ; just as I often wondered 



C34 BEGGARS 

how he fell to be a beggar. He had served 
through the Mutiny — of which (like so many 
people) he could tell practically nothing beyond 
the names of places, and that it was '' difficult 
work, sir," and very iiot, or that so-and-so was 
" a very fine commander, sir." He was far too 
smart a man to have remained a private; in the 
nature of things, he must have won his stripes. 
And yet here he w^as without a pension. When I 
touched on this problem, he would content him- 
self with diffidently offering me advice. '' A man 
should be very careful when he is young, sir. 
If you '11 excuse me saying so, a spirited young 
gentleman like yourself, sir, should be very care- 
ful. I was perhaps a trifle inclined to atheistical 
opinions myself." For (perhaps with a deeper 
wisdom than we are inclined in these days to 
admit) he plainly bracketed agnosticism with 
beer and skittles. 

Keats — John Keats, sir, — and Shelley were 
his favourite bards. I cannot remember if I tried 
him with Rossetti ; but I know his taste to a hair, 
and if ever I did, he must have doted on that 



BEGGARS 235 

author. What took him was a richness in the 
speech ; he loved the exotic, the unexpected word ; 
the moving cadence of a phrase; a vague sense of 
emotion (about nothing) in the very letters of the 
alphabet : the romance of language. His honest 
head was very nearly empty, his intellect like a 
child's; and when he read his favourite authors, 
he can almost never have understood what he was 
reading. Yet the taste was not only genuine, it 
was exclusive ; I tried in vain to offer him novels ; 
he would none of them ; he cared for nothing but 
romantic language that he could not understand. 
The case may be commoner than we suppose. I 
am reminded of a lad who was laid in the next cot 
to a friend of mine in a public hospital, and who 
was no sooner installed than he sent out (perhaps 
with his last pence) for a cheap Shakespeare. My 
friend pricked up his ears; fell at once in talk 
with his new neighbour, and was ready, when the 
book arrived, to make a singular discovery. For 
this lover of great literature understood not one 
sentence out of twelve, and his favourite part was 
that of which he understood the least — the inimi- 



236 BEGGARS 

table, mouth-filling rodomontade of the ghost in 
Hamlet. It was a bright day in hospital when my 
friend expounded the sense of this beloved jargon : 
a task for which I am willing to believe my friend 
was very fit, though I can never regard it as an 
easy one. I know mdeed a point or two, on whicli 
I would gladly question Mr. Shakespeare, that 
lover of big words, could he revisit the glimpses 
of the moon, or could I myself climb backward to 
the spacious days of Elizabeth. But in the second 
case, I should most likely pretermit these ques- 
tionings, and take my place instead in the pit at 
the Blackfriars, to hear the actor in his favourite 
part, playing up to Mr. Burbage, and rolling out 
— as I seem to hear him — with a ponderous 
gusto — 

" Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd." 

What a pleasant chance, if we could go there in a 
party ! and what a surprise for Mr. Burbage. when 
the ghost received the honours of the evening! 

As for my old soldier, like Mr. Burbage and 
Mr. Shakespeare, he is long since dead; and now 
lies buried, I suppose, and nameless and quite 



BEGGARS 237 

forgotten, in some poor city graveyard. — But not 
for me, you brave heart, have you been buried ! 
For me, you are still afoot, tasting the sun and air, 
and striding southward. By the groves of Comis- 
ton and beside the Hermitage of Braid, by the 
Hunters' Tryst, and where the curlews and plovers 
cry around Fairmilehead, I see and hear you, stal- 
wartly carrying your deadly sickness, cheerfully 
discoursing of uncomprehended poets. 

II 

The thought of the old soldier recalls that of 
another tramp, his counterpart. This was a little, 
lean, and fiery man, with the eyes of a dog and the 
face of a gipsy; whom I found one morning 
encamped with his wife and children and his 
grinder's wheel, beside the burn of Kinnaird. To 
this beloved dell I went, at that time, daily; and 
daily the knife-grinder and I (for as long as his 
tent continued pleasantly to interrupt my little 
wilderness) sat on two stones, and smoked, and 
plucked grass, and talked to the tune of the brown 
water. His children were mere whelps, they 



238 BEGGARS 

fought and bit among the fern hke vermin. His 
wife was a mere squaw ; I saw her gather brush 
and tend the kettle, but she never ventured to 
address her lord while I was present. The tent 
was a mere gipsy hovel, like a sty for pigs. But 
the grinder himself had the fine self-sufficiency and 
grave politeness of the hunter and the savage; he 
did me the honours of this dell, which had been 
mine but the day before, took me far into the 
secrets of his life, and used me (I am proud to 
remember) as a friend. 

Like my old soldier, he was far gone in the 
national complaint. Unlike him, he had a vulgar 
taste in letters ; scarce flying higher than the story 
papers; probably finding no difference, certainly 
seeking none, between Tannahill and Burns; his 
noblest thoughts, whether of poetry or music, ade- 
quately embodied in that somewhat obvious ditty, 

" Will ye gang, lassie, gang 
To the braes o' Balquidder " : 

— which is indeed apt to echo in the ears of Scot- 
tish children, and to him, in view of his experience, 
must have found a special directness of address. 



BEGGARS 239 

But if he had no fine sense of poetry in letters, he 
felt vnth a deep joy the poetry of life. You should 
have heard him speak of what he loved; of the 
tent pitched beside the talking water; of the stars 
overhead at night ; of the blest return of morning, 
the peep of day over the moors, the awaking birds 
among the birches; how he abhorred the long 
winter shut in cities ; and with what delight, at 
the return of the spring, he once more pitched his 
camp in the living out-of-doors. But we were a 
pair of tramps; and to you, who are doubtless 
sedentary and a consistent first-class passenger in 
life, he would scarce have laid himself so open; 
— to you, he might have been content to tell his 
story of a ghost — that of a buccaneer with his 
pistols as he lived — whom he had once encoun- 
tered in a sea-side cave near Buckie; and that 
would have been enough, for that would have 
shown you the mettle of the man. Here was a 
piece of experience solidly and livingly built up 
in words, here was a story created, teres atque 
rotund us. 

And to think of the old soldier, that lover of the 



240 BEGGARS 

literary bards ! He had visited stranger spots than 
any sea-side cave; encountered men more terrible 
than any spirit; done and dared and suffered in 
that incredible, unsung epic of the Mutiny War; 
pla3^ed his part with the field force of Delhi, be- 
leaguering and beleaguered; shared in that en- 
during, savage anger and contempt of death and 
decency that, for long months together, bedevil'd 
and inspired the army; was hurled to and fro in 
the battle-smoke of the assault ; was there, per- 
haps, where Nicholson fell ; was there when the 
attacking column, with hell upon every side, found 
the soldier's enemy — strong drink, and the lives 
of tens of thousands trembled in the scale, and the 
fate of the flag of England staggered. And of 
all this he had no more to say than " hot work, 
sir," or " the army suffered a great deal, sir," or 
" I believe General Wilson, sir, w^as not very highly 
thought of in the papers." His life was naught to 
him, the vivid pages of experience quite blank: 
in words his pleasure lay — melodious, agitated 
words — printed words, about that which he had 
never seen and was connatally incapable of com- 



BEGGARS 241 

prehending. We have here two temperaments 
face to face; both untrained, unsophisticated, sur- 
prised (we may say) in the egg; both boldly char- 
actered : — that of the artist, the lover and artificer 
of words ; that of the maker, the seeer, the lover 
and forger of experience. If the one had a 
daughter and the other had a son, and these 
married, might not some illustrious writer count 
descent from the beggar-soldier and the needy 
knife-grinder? 

Ill 

Every one lives by selling something, whatever 

be his right to it. The burglar sells at the same 

time his own skill and courage and my silver plate 

(the whole at the most moderate figure) to a Jew 

receiver. The bandit sells the traveller an article 

of prime necessity: that traveller's life. And as 

for the old soldier, who stands for central mark 

to my capricious figures of eight, he dealt in a 

specialty ; for he was the only beggar in the world 

who ever gave me pleasure for my money. He 

had learned a school of manners in the barracks 

16 



242 BEGGARS 

and had the sense to cHng to it, accosting strangers 
with a regimental freedom, thanking patrons with 
a merely regimental difference, sparing you at once 
the tragedy of his position and the embarrassment 
of yours. There was not one hint about him of the 
beggar's emphasis, the outburst of revolting grati- 
tude, the rant and cant, the '' God bless you. Kind, 
Kind gentleman," which insults the smallness of 
your alms by disproportionate vehemence, which 
is so notably false, which would be so unbearable 
if it were true. I am sometimes tempted to sup- 
pose this reading of the beggar's part, a survival of 
the old days when Shakespeare was intoned upon 
the stage and mourners keened beside the death- 
bed; to think that we cannot now accept these 
strong emotions unless they be uttered in the just 
note of life; nor (save in the pulpit) endure these 
gross conventions. They wound us, I am tempted 
to say, like mockery; the high voice of keening 
(as it yet lingers on) strikes in the face of sorrow 
like a buffet; and the rant and cant of the staled 
beggar stirs in us a shudder of disgust. But the 
fact disproves these amateur opinions. The beggar 



BEGGARS 243 

lives by his knowledge of the average man. He 
knows what he is about when he bandages his 
head, and hires and drugs a babe, and poisons life 
with Poor Mary Ann or Long, long ago; he knows 
what he is about when he loads the critical ear and 
sickens the nice conscience with intolerable thanks; 
they know what they are about, he and his crew, 
when they pervade the slums of cities, ghastly 
parodies of suffering, hateful parodies of grati- 
tude. This trade can scarce be called an imposi- 
tion; it has been so blown upon with exposures; 
it flaunts its fraudulence so nakedly. We pay 
them as we pay those who show us, in huge ex- 
aggeration, the monsters of our drinking-water; 
or those who daily predict the fall of Britain. We 
pay them for the pain they inflict, pay them, and 
wince, and hurry on. And truly there is nothing 
that can shake the conscience like a beggar's 
thanks; and that polity in which such protesta- 
tions can be purchased for a shilling, seems no 
scene for an honest man. 

Are there, then, we may be asked, no genuine 
beggars? And the answer is, Not one. My old 



244 BEGGARS 

soldier was a humbug like the rest; his ragged 
boots were, in the stage phrase, properties; whole 
boots were given him again and again, and always 
gladly accepted ; and the next day, there he was on 
the road as usual, with toes exposed. His boots 
were his method; they were the man's trade; 
without his boots he would have starved; he did 
not live by charity, but by appealing to a gross taste 
in the public, which loves the limelight on the 
actor's face, and the toes out of the beggar's boots. 
There is a true poverty, which no one sees : a false 
and merely mimetic poverty, which usurps its place 
and dress, and lives and above all drinks, on the 
fruits of the usurpation. The true poverty does 
not go into the streets; the banker may rest as- 
sured, he has never put a penny in its hand. The 
self-respecting poor beg from each other; never 
from the rich. To live in the frock-coated ranks 
of life, to hear canting scenes of gratitude re- 
hearsed for twopence, a man might suppose that 
giving was a thing gone out of fashion ; yet it goes 
forward on a scale so great ct-s to fill me with sur- 
prise. In the houses of the working class, all day 



BEGGARS 245 

long there will be a foot upon the stair; all day 
long there will be a knocking at the doors ; beggars 
come, beggars go, without stint, hardly with inter- 
mission, from morning till night; and meanwhile, 
in the same city and but a few streets off, the 
castles of the rich stand unsummoned. Get the 
tale of any honest tramp, you will find it was al- 
ways the poor who helped him ; get the truth from 
any workman who has met misfortunes, it was 
always next door that he would go for help, or 
only with such exceptions as are said to prove a 
rule; look at the course of the mimetic beggar, it 
is through the poor quarters that he trails his pas- 
sage, showing his bandages to every window, 
piercing even to the attics with his nasal song. 
Here is a remarkable state of things in our Chris- 
tian commonwealths, that the poor only should be 
asked to give. 

IV 

There is a pleasant tale of some worthless, 
phrasing Frenchman, who was taxed with ingrati- 
tude : '^ // faut saz'oir garder rindcpcndance dii 



246 BEGGARS 

coeur," cried he. I own I feel with him. Gratitude 
without famiharity, gratitude otherwise than as a 
nameless element in a friendship, is a thing so near 
to hatred that I do not care to split the difference. 
Until I find a man who is pleased to receive obliga- 
tions, I shall continue to question the tact of those 
who are eager to confer them. What an art it is, 
to give, even to our nearest friends ! and what a 
test of manners, to receive! How, upon either 
side, we smuggle away the obligation, blushing for 
each other ; how bluff and dull we make the giver ; 
how hasty, how falsely cheerful, the receiver ! And 
yet an act of such difficulty and distress between 
near friends, it is supposed we can perform to a 
total stranger and leave the man transfixed watli 
grateful emotions. The last thing you can do to 
a man is to burthen him with an obligation, and it 
is what we propose to begin with ! But let us not 
be deceived : unless he is totally degraded to his 
trade, anger jars in his inside, and he grates his 
teeth at our gratuity. 

We should wipe two words from our vocabu- 
lary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is 



BEGG.\RS 247 

given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is 
received from the hand of friendship, or it is re- 
sented. We are all too proud to take a naked gift : 
we must seem to pay it, if in nothing else, then with 
the delights of our society. Here, then, is the piti- 
ful fix of the rich man ; here is that needle's eye in 
which he stuck already in the days of Christ, and 
still sticks to-day, firmer, if possible, than ever: 
that he has the money and lacks the love which 
should make his money acceptable. Here and now, 
just as of old in Palestine, he has the rich to 
dinner, it is with the rich that he takes his pleasure : 
and when his turn comes to be charitable, he looks 
in vain for a recipient. His friends are not poor, 
they do not want; the poor are not his friends, 
they will not take. To whom is he to give? 
Where to find — note this phrase — the Deserving 
Poor? Charity is (what they call) centralised; 
offices are hired; societies founded, with secre- 
taries paid or unpaid : the hunt of the Deserving 
Poor goes merrily forward. I think it will take 
more than a merely human secretary to disinter 
that character. What ! a class that is to be in want 



248 BEGGARS 

from no fault of its own, and yet greedily eager to 
receive from strangers ; and to be quite respectable, 
and at the same time quite devoid of self-respect; 
and play the most delicate part of friendship, and 
yet never be seen ; and wear the form of man, and 
yet fly in the face of all the laws of human nature : 
— and all this, in the hope of getting a belly-god 
Burgess through a needle's eye! O, let him stick, 
by all means : and let his polity tumble in the 
dust; and let his epitaph and all his literature (of 
which my own works begin to form no inconsider- 
able part) be abolished even from the history of 
man ! For a fool of this monstrosity of dulness, 
there can be no salvation : and the fool who looked 
for the elixir of life was an angel of reason to the 
fool who looks for the Deserving Poor! 



And yet there is one course which the unfor- 
tunate gentleman may take. He may subscribe to 
pay the taxes. There were the true charity, impar- 
tial and impersonal, cumbering none with obliga- 
tion, helping all. There were a destination for 



BEGGARS 249 

loveless gifts; there were the v/ay to reach the 
pocket of the deserving poor, and yet save the time 
of secretaries! But, alas! there is no colour of 
romance in such a course; and people nowhere 
demand the picturesque so much as in their 
virtues. 



LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 
WHO PROPOSES TO EMBRACE 
THE CAREER OF ART 

WITH the agreeable frankness of youth, 
you address me on a point of some 
practical importance to yourself and (it 
is even conceivable) of some gravity to the world: 
Should you or should you not become an artist? 
It is one which you must decide entirely for your- 
self; all that I can do is to bring under your 
notice some of the materials of that decision ; 
and I will begin, as I shall probably conclude 
also, by assuring you that all depends on the 
vocation. 

To know what you like is the beginning of 
wisdom and of old age. Youth is wholly experi- 
mental. The essence and charm of that unquiet 
and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well 
as ignorance of life. These two unknowns the 
young man brings together again and again, now 



A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 251 

in the airiest touch, now with a bitter hug; now 
with exquisite pleasure, now with cutting pain ; 
but never with indifference, to which he is a total 
stranger, and never with that near kinsman of 
indifference, contentment. If he be a youth of 
dainty senses or a brain easily heated, the interest 
of this series of experiments grows upon him out 
of all proportion to the pleasure he receives. It 
is not beauty that he loves, nor pleasure that he 
seeks, though he may think so ; his design and 
his sufficient reward is to verify his own existence 
and taste the variety of human fate. To him, 
before the razor-edge of curiosity is dulled, all 
that is not actual living and the hot chase of 
experience wears a face of a disgusting dryness 
difficult to recall in later days; or if there be 
any exception — and here destiny steps in — it is 
in those moments when, wearied or surfeited of 
the primary activity of the senses, he calls up 
before memory the image of transacted pains 
and pleasures. Thus it is that such an one 
shies from all cut-and-dry professions, and in- 
clines insensibly toward that career of art which 



252 LETTER TO 

consists only in the tasting and recording of 
experience. 

This, which is not so much a vocation for art 
as an impatience of all other honest trades, fre- 
quently exists alone; and so existing, it will pass 
gently away in the course of years. Emphatically, 
it is not to be regarded; it is not a vocation, but 
a temptation; and when your father the other 
day so fiercely and (in my view) so properly dis- 
couraged your ambition, he was recalling not 
improbably some similar passage in his own ex- 
perience. For the temptation is perhaps nearly 
as common as the vocation is rare. But again 
we have vocations which are imperfect; we have 
men whose minds are bound up, not so much in 
any art, as in the general ars artiurn and common 
base of all creative work; who will now dip into 
painting, and now study counterpoint, and anon 
will be inditing a sonnet : all these with equal 
interest, all often with genuine knowledge. And 
of this temper, when it stands alone, I find it 
difficult to speak; but I should counsel such an 
one to take to letters, for in literature (which 



A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 2S3 

drag's with so wide a net) all h's information 
may be found some day useful, and 'f he should 
go on as he has begun, and turn at last- into the 
critic, he will have learned to use the necessary 
tools. Lastly we come to those vocations which 
are at once decisive and precise; to the men who 
are born with the love of pigments, the passion 
of drawing, the gift of music, or the impulse to 
create with words, just as other and perhaps the 
same men are born with the love of hunting, or 
the sea, or horses, or the turning-lathe. These 
are predestined; if a man love the labour of any 
trade, apart from any question of success or fame, 
the gods have called him. He may have the gen- 
eral vocation too : he may have a taste for all 
the arts, and I think he often has; but the mark 
of his calling is this laborious partiality for one, 
this inextinguishable zest in its technical successes, 
and (perhaps above all) a certain candour of 
mind, to take his very trifling enterprise w^ith a 
gravity that would befit the cares of empire, and 
to think the smallest improvement worth accom- 
plishing at any expense of time and industry. The 



254 T.ETTER TO 

book, the staiue, the sonata, must be gone upon 
with the u-'ireasoning good faith and the unflag- 
ging spirit of children at their play. Is it zvorth 
doinf, ? — when it shall have occurred to any artist 
to ask himself that question, it is implicitly an- 
swered in the negative. It does not occur to the 
child as he plays at being a pirate on the dining- 
room sofa, nor to the hunter as he pursues his 
quarry; and the candour of the one and the ar- 
dour of the other should be united in the bosom 
of the artist. 

If you recognise in yourself some such decisive 
taste, there is no room for hesitation : follow your 
bent. And observe (lest I should too much dis- 
courage you) that the disposition does not usually 
burn so brightly at the first, or rather not so con- 
stantly. Habit and practice sharpen gifts; the 
necessity of toil grows less disgusting, grows even 
\velcome, in the course of years ; a small taste 
(if it be only genuine) waxes with indulgence into 
an exclusive passion. Enough, just now, if you 
can look back over a fair interval, and see that 
your chosen art has a little more than held its 



A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 255 

own among the thronging interess of youth. 
Time will do the rest, if devotion hOo it; and 
soon your every thought will be engrosser in that 
beloved occupation. ^ 

But even with devotion, you may remind me, 
even with unfaltering and delighted industry, 
many thousand artists spend their lives, if the 
result be regarded, utterly in vain : a thousand 
artists, and never one work of art. But the vast 
mass of mankind are incapable of doing anything 
reasonably well, art among the rest. The w^orth- 
less artist would not improbably have been a quite 
incompetent baker. And the artist, even if he 
does not amuse the public, amuses himself; so 
that there will always be one man the happier 
for his vigils. This is the practical side of art: 
its inexpugnable fortress for the true practitioner. 
The direct returns — the wages of the trade — 
are small, but the indirect — the wages of the 
life — are incalculably great. No other business 
offers a man his daily bread upon such joyful 
terms. The soldier and the explorer have mo- 
ments of a worthier excitement, but they are 



256 lETTER TO 

purchased by riuel hardships and periods of tedium 
that' beg^'it language. In the hfe of the artist 
there v.^d be no hour without its pleasure. I 
take the author, with whose career I am best ac- 
quainted; and it is true he works in a rebellious 
material, and that the act of writing is cramped 
and trying both to the eyes and the temper; but 
remark him in his study, when matter crowds 
upon him and words are not wanting — in what 
a continual series of small successes time flows 
by ; with what a sense of power as of one mov- 
ing mountains, he marshals his petty characters; 
with what pleasures, both of the ear and eye, he 
sees his airy structure growing on the page; and 
how he labours in a craft to which the whole 
material of his life is tributary, and which opens 
a door to all his tastes, his loves, his hatreds, and 
his convictions, so that what he writes is only 
what he longed to utter. He may have enjoyed 
many things in this big, tragic playground of the 
world; but what shall he have enjoyed more 
fully than a morning of successful work? Sup- 
pose it ill paid : the wonder is it should be paid 



A YOUNG GENTLKMAN 257 

at all. Other men pay, and pay deariy, for pleas- 
ures less desirable. 

Nor will the practice of art afford you pleasure 
only; it affords besides an admirable trai^iing. 
For the artist works entirely upon honour. Ti?e 
public knows little or nothing of those merits in 
the quest of which you are condemned to spend the 
bulk of your endeavours. Merits of design, the 
merit of first-hand energy, the merit of a cer- 
tain cheap accomplishment which a man of the 
artistic temper easily acquires — these they can 
recognise, and these they value. But to those 
more exquisite refinements of proficiency and 
finish, which the artist so ardently desires and 
so keenly feels, for which (in the vigorous words 
of Balzac) he must toil " like a miner buried in 
a landslip," for which, day after day, he recasts 
and revises and rejects — the gross mass of the 
public must be ever blind. To those lost pains, 
suppose you attain the highest pitch of merit, pos- 
terity may possibly do justice; suppose, as is so 
probable, you fail by even a hair's breadth of the 
l:ighest, rest certain they shall never be observed. 

17 



258 LETTER TO 

Under the phadow of this cold thought, alone in 
his studio, the artist must preserve from day to 
day his constancy to the ideal. It is this which 
makes his life noble; it is by this that the prac- 
tice of his craft strengthens and matures his 
character; it is for this that even the serious 
countenance of the great emperor was turned ap- 
provingly (if only for a moment) on the follow- 
ers of Apollo, and that sternly gentle voice bade 
the artist cherish his art. 

And here there fall two warnings to be made. 
First, if you are to continue to be a law to 
yourself, you must beware of the first signs of 
laziness. This idealism in honesty can only be 
supported by perpetual effort ; the standard is easily 
lowered, the artist who says " It will do,'' is on 
the downward path ; three or four pot-boilers are 
enough at times (above all at wrong times) to 
falsify a talent, and by the practice of journalism 
a man runs the risk of becoming wedded to cheap 
finish. This is the danger on the one side; there 
is not less upon the other. The consciousness of 
how much the artist is (and must be) a law to 



A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 259 

himself, debauches the small heads. "' r i^,i-MT 
recondite merits very hard to attain, m^ ', ,r 
swallowing artistic formulae, or perhaps fain. ,^- in 
love with some particular proficiency of his o.c;n, 
many artists forget the end of all art : to please. 
It is doubtless tempting to exclaim against the 
ignorant bourgeois; yet it should not be for- 
gotten, it is he who is to pay us, and that (surely 
on the face of it) for services that he shall desire 
to have performed. Here also, if properly con- 
sidered, there is a question of transcendental hon- 
esty. To give the public what they do not want, 
and yet expect to be supported : we have there 
a strange pretension, and yet not uncommon, above 
all with painters. The first duty in this world is 
for a man to pay his way; when that is quite 
accomplished, he may plunge into what eccentri- 
city he likes ; but emphatically not till then. Till 
then, he must pay assiduous court to the bour- 
geois who carries the purse. And if in the course 
of these capitulations he shall falsify his talent, 
it can never have been a strong one, and he will 
have preserved a better thing than talent — char- 



26o ^i^LETTER TO 

acter. O' if he be of a mind so independent that 
he car lot stoop to this necessity, one course is 
yet r pen : he can desist from art, and follow some 
mjre manly way of life. 

I speak of a more manly way of life, it is a 
point on which I must be frank. To live by a pleas- 
ure is not a high calling; it involves patronage, 
however veiled; it numbers the artist, however 
ambitious, along with dancing-girls and billiard- 
markers. The French have a romantic evasion 
for one employment, and call its practitioners 
the Daughters of Joy. The artist is of the same 
family, he is of the Sons of Joy, chose his trade 
to please himself, gains his livelihood by pleasing 
others, and has parted with something of the 
sterner dignity of man. Journals but a little while 
ago declaimed against the Tennyson peerage; and 
this Son of Joy was blamed for condescension 
when he followed the example of Lord Lawrence 
and Lord Cairns and Lord Clyde. The poet was 
more happily inspired; with a better modesty he 
accepted the honour; and anonymous journalists 
have not yet (if I am to believe them) recovered 



A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 261 

the vicarious disgrace to their profession. When 
it comes to their turn, these gentlemen czn do 
themselves more justice; and I shall be glaa.to 
think of it; for to my barbarian eyesight, eveti 
Lord Tennyson looks somewhat out of place in 
that assembly. There should be no honours for 
the artist; he has already, in the practice of his 
art, more than his share of the rewards of life; 
the honours are pre-empted for other trades, less 
agreeable and perhaps more useful. 

But the devil in these trades of pleasing is to 
fail to please. In ordinary occupations, a man 
offers to do a certain thing or to produce a cer- 
tain article with a merely conventional accom- 
plishment, a design in which (we may almost 
say) it is difficult to fail. But the artist steps 
forth out of the crowd and proposes to delight: 
an impudent design, in which it is impossible to 
fail without odious circumstances. The poor 
Daughter of Joy, carrying her smiles and finery 
quite unregarded through the crowd, makes a 
figure which it is impossible to recall without a 
wounding pity. She is the type of the unsuc- 



262 LETTER TO 

cessful artist. The actor, the dancer, and the 
singer must appear Hke her in person, and drain 
puihcly the cup of failure. But though the rest 
6f us escape this crowning bitterness of the pil- 
lory, we all court in essence the same humilia- 
tion. We all profess to be able to delight. And 
how few of us are! We all pledge ourselves to 
be able to continue to delight. And the day w^ill 
come to each, and even to the most admired, 
when the ardour shall have declined and the cun- 
ning shall be lost, and he shall sit by his deserted 
booth ashamed. Then shall he see himself con- 
demned to do work for wdiich he blushes to take 
payment. Then (as if his lot were not already 
cruel) he must lie exposed to the gibes of the 
wreckers of the press, who earn a little bitter 
bread by the condemnation of trash which they 
have not read, and the praise of excellence which 
they cannot understand. 

And observe that this seems almost the neces- 
sary end at least of writers. Les Blancs et les 
Blcits (for instance) is of an order of merit very 
different from Le Vicomtc dc Bragelonnc ; and 



A YOUNG GENTLEiAN 263 

if any gentleman can bear to spy upon ii naked- 
ness of Castle Dangerous, his name I ink is 
Ham : let it be enough for the rest of us to fid 
of it (not without tears) in the pages of Lockhart 
Thus in old age, when occupation and comfort 
are most needful, the writer must lay aside at 
once his pastime and his breadwinner. The 
painter indeed, if he succeed at all in engaging 
the attention of the public, gains great sums and 
can stand to his easel until a great age without 
dishonourable failure. The writer has the double 
misfortune to be ill-paid while he can work, and 
to be incapable of working when he is old. It is 
thus a way of life which conducts directly to a 
false position. 

For the writer (in spite of notorious examples 
to the contrary) must look to be ill-paid. Tenny- 
son and Montepin make handsome livelihoods ; but 
we cannot all hope to be Tennyson, and we do not 
all perhaps desire to be Montepin. If you adopt 
an art to be your trade, weed your mind at the 
outset of all desire of money. What you may 
decently expect, if you have some talent and much 



264 LETTER TO 

inclury, is such an income as a clerk will earn 
wi.^ a tenth or perhaps a twentieth of your ner- 
::;us output. Nor have you the right to look for 
more; in the wages of the life, not in the wages 
of the trade, lies your reward ; the work is here 
the wages. It will be seen I have little sympathy 
with the common lamentations of the artist class. 
Perhaps they do not remember the hire of the field 
labourer; or do they think no parallel will lie? 
Perhaps they have never observed what is the re- 
tiring allowance of a field officer; or do they 
suppose their contributions to the arts of pleas- 
ing more important than the services of a colonel? 
Perhaps they forget on how little Millet was con- 
tent to live; or do they think, because they have 
less genius, they stand excused from the display 
of equal virtues ? But upon one point there should 
be no dubiety: if a man be not frugal, he has no 
business in the arts. If he be not frugal, he steers 
directly for that last tragic scene of Ic vicitx sal- 
timbanque; if he be not frugal, he will find it 
hard to continue to be honest. Some day, when 
the butcher is knocking at the door, he may be 



A YOUNG GENTLEM/^N 265 

tempted, he may be obliged, to turn out .nd sell 
a slovenly piece of work. If the obligation- shall 
have arisen through no wantonness of his own, 
he is even to be commended; for words canno'J 
describe how far more necessary it is that a man 
should support his family, than that he should 
attain to — or preserve — distinction in the arts. 
But if the pressure comes through his own faulty 
he has stolen, and stolen under trust, and stolen 
(which is the worst of all) in such a way that 
no law can reach him. 

And now you may perhaps ask me, if the debu- 
tant artist is to have no thought of money, and 
if (as is implied) he is to expect no honours from 
the State, he may not at least look forward to 
the delights of popularity? Praise, you will tell 
me, is a savoury dish. And in so far as you 
may mean the countenance of other artists, you 
would put your finger on one of the most essen- 
tial and enduring pleasures of the career of art. 
But in so far as you should have an eye to the 
commendations of the public or the notice of the 
newspapers, be sure you would but be cherishing 



266 A /OUNG GENTLEMAN 

a drear- It is true that in certain esoteric jour- 
nals -he author (for instance) is duly criticised, 
an J that he is often praised a great deal more 
Xhan he deserves, sometimes for qualities which 
' he prided himself on eschewing, and sometimes 
by ladies and gentlemen who have denied them- 
selves the privilege of reading his work. But if 
a man be sensitive to this wild praise, we must 
suppose him equally alive to that which often 
accompanies and always follows it — wild ridi- 
cule. A man may have done well for years, and 
then he may fail; he will hear of his failure. 
Or he may have done well for years, and still do 
well, but the critics may have tired of praising 
him, or there may have sprung up some new 
idol of the instant, some " dust a little gilt," to 
whom they now prefer to offer sacrifice. Here is 
the obverse and the reverse of that empty and 
ugly thing called popularity. Will any man sup- 
pose it worth the gaining? 



i- \ 



2rS 

^ ■ 






'L 



PULVIS EX UMBRA 

WE look for some reward of our en- 
deavours and are disappointed; not 
success, not happiness, not even peace 
of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do 
well. Our frailties are invincible, our virtues bar- 
ren; the battle goes sore against us to the going 
down of the sun. The canting moralist tells us of 
right and wrong; and we look abroad, even on 
the face of our small earth, and find them change 
with every climate, and no country where some 
action is not honoured for a virtue and none where 
it is not branded for a vice; and we look in our 
experience, and find no vital congruity in the 
wisest rules, but at the best a municipal fitness. It 
is not strange if we are tempted to despair of good. 
We ask too much. Our religions and moralities 
have been trimmed to flatter us, till they are all 
emasculate and sentimentalised, and only please 



■S 



PU LVIS ET U M BRA 

. weaken. Truth is of a rougher strain. In the 
.arsh face of hfe, faith can read a bracing gospel. 
The human race is a thing more ancient than the 
ten commandments ; and the bones and revolutions 
of the Kosmos, in whose joints we are but moss 
and fungus, more ancient still. 



Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports 
many doubtful things and all of them appalling. 
There seems no substance to this solid globe on 
which we stamp: nothing but symbols and ratios. 
Symbols and ratios carry us and bring us forth 
and beat us down; gravity that swings the incom- 
mensurable suns and worlds through space, is but 
a figment varying inversely as the squares of dis- 
tances; and the suns and worlds themselves, im- 
ponderable figures of abstraction, NHg and H2 O. 
Consideration dares not dwell upon this view; 
that way madness lies; science carries us into 
zones of speculation, where there is no habitable 
city for the mind of man. 

But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as 



PULVIS ET UMBRi. v 2cS 

■ * "*) ■ 

our senses give it us. We behold space sown 
rotatory islands, suns and worlds and the sha. 
and wrecks of systems : some, like the sun, stiL 
blazing; some rotting, like the earth; others, like 
the moon, stable in desolation. All of these \\q 
take to be made of something w^e call matter: a 
thing which no analysis can help us to conceive; 
to whose incredible properties no familiarity can 
reconcile our minds. This stuff, when not purified 
by the lustration of fire, rots uncleanly into some- 
thing we call life ; seized through all its atoms with 
a pediculous malady; swelling in tumours that 
become independent, sometimes even (by an ab- 
horrent prodigy) locomotory; one splitting into 
millions, millions cohering into one, as the malady 
proceeds through varying stages. This vital pu- 
trescence of the dust, used as w^e are to it, yet 
strikes us with occasional disgust, and the pro- 
fusion of worms in a piece of ancient turf, or the 
air of a marsh darkened with insects, will some- 
times check our breathing so that we aspire for 
cleaner places. But none is clean : the moving 
sand is infected with lice; the pure spring, where 



.^ULVIS ET UMBRA 

rsts out of the mountain, is a mere issue of 
rms; even in the hard rock the crystal is 
lorming. 

In two main shapes this eruption covers the 
countenance of the earth : the animal and the vege- 
table: one in some degree the inversion of the 
other : the second rooted to the spot ; the first 
coming detached out of its natal mud, and scurry- 
ing abroad with the myriad feet of insects or 
towering into the heavens on the wings of birds : 
a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well con- 
sidered, the heart stops. To what passes with the 
anchored vermin, we have little clue: doubtless 
they have their joys and sorrows, their delights and 
killing agonies: it appears not how. But of the 
locomotory, to which we ourselves belong, we can 
tell more. These share with us a thousand mir- 
acles : the miracles of sight, of hearing, of the 
projection of sound, things that bridge space; 
the miracles of memory and reason, by which the 
present is conceived, and when it is gone, its image 
kept living in the brains of man and brute; the 
miracle of reproduction, with its imperious desires 



PULVIS ET UMBRA v ^^rS 

and staggering consequences. And to put the la. , ^ . 
touch upon this mountain mass of the revolting 
and the inconceivable, all these prey upon each 
other, lives tearing other lives in pieces, cramming 
them inside themselves, and by that summary 
process, growing fat : the vegetarian, the whale, 
perhaps the tree, not less than the lion of the 
desert; for the vegetarian is only the eater of the 
dumb. 

Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with pre- 
datory life, and more drenched with blood, both 
animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship, 
scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and 
turns alternate cheeks to the reverberation of a 
blazing world, ninety million miles away. 

II 

What a monstrous spectre is this man, the 
disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate 
feet or lying drugged with slumber ; killing, feed- 
ing, growing, bringing forth small copies of him- 
self ; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with 
eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to 



PU LV I S ET UMBRA 

t children screaming; — and yet looked at near- 
lier, known as his fellows know him, how sur- 
prising are his attributes ! Poor soul, here for so 
little, cast among so many hardships, filled with 
desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent, 
savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irre- 
mediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives : 
who should have blamed him had he been of a 
piece with his destiny and a being merely bar- 
barous? And we look and behold him instead 
filled with imperfect virtues : infinitely childish, 
often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind ; 
sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate 
of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity ; 
rising up to do battle for an Qgg or die for an idea ; 
singling out his friends and his mate with cordial 
afifection ; bringing forth in pain, rearing with 
long-sufTering solicitude, his young. To touch the 
heart of his mystery, we find in him one thought, 
. strange to the point of lunacy : the thought of 
-^- duty; the thought of something owing to himself, 
to his neighbour, to his God : an ideal of decency, 
to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit 



N 2cS 



P U L V I S E T UMBRA .V^ 

of shame, below which, if it be possible, he will no\ i, \ 
stoop. The design in most men is one of con- 
formity; here and there, in picked natures, it 
transcends itself and soars on the other side, arm- 
ing martyrs with independence ; but in all, in their 
degrees, it is a bosom thought : — Not in man 
alone, for we trace it in dogs and cats whom we 
know fairly well, and doubtless some similar point 
of honour sways the elephant, the oyster, and the 
louse, of whom we know so little : — But in man, 
at least, it sways with so complete an empire that 
merely selfish things come second, even with the 
selfish : that appetites are starved, fears are con- 
quered, pains supported; that almost the dullest 
shrinks from the reproof of a glance, although it 
were a child's ; and all but the most cowardly stand 
amid the risks of war ; and the more noble, having 
strongly conceived an act as due to their ideal, 
affront and embrace death. Strange enough if, 
with their singular origin and perverted practice, 
they think they are to be rewarded in some future 
life : stranger still, if they are persuaded of the 

contrary, and think this blow, which they solicit, 

iS 



I PULVIS ET U M B RA 

\vill strike them senseless for eternity. I shall be 
reminded what a tragedy of misconception and 
misconduct man at large presents : of organised 
injustice, cowardly violence, and treacherous crime; 
and of the damning imperfections of the best. 
They cannot be too darkly drawn. Man is indeed 
marked for failure in his efforts to do right. But 
where the best consistently miscarry, how tenfold 
more remarkable that all should continue to strive ; 
and surely we should find it both touching and 
inspiriting, that in a field from which success is 
banished, our race should not cease to labour. 

If the first view of this creature, stalking in his 
rotatory isle, be a thing to shake the courage of 
the stoutest, on this nearer sight, he startles us 
with an admiring wonder. It matters not where 
we look, under what climate we observe him, in 
what stage of society, in what depth of ignorance, 
burthened with what erroneous rnorality ; by camp- 
fires in Assiniboia, the snow powdering his shoul- 
ders, the wind plucking his blanket, as he sits, 
passing the ceremonial calumet and uttering his 
grave opinions like a Roman senator; in ships at 



PULVIS ET UMBRA ^ ^^^'^ 

sea, a man inured to hardship and vile pleastu ^ 
his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern and a be- 
dizened trull who sells herself to rob him, and he 
for all that simple, innocent, cheerful, kindly like 
a child, constant to toil, brave to drown, for others ; 
in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent 
millions to mechanical employments, without hope 
of change in the future, with scarce a pleasure in 
the present, and yet true to his virtues, honest jipL. 
to his lights, kind to his neighbours, tempted per- 
haps in vain by the bright gin-palace, perhaps long- 
suffering with the drunken wife that ruins him ; 
in India (a woman this time) kneeling with broken 
cries and streaming tears, as she drowns her child 
in the sacred river; in the brothel, the discard of 
society, living mainly on strong drink, fed with 
affronts, a fool, a thief, the comrade of thieves, and 
even here keeping the point of honour and the 
touch of pity, often repaying the world's scorn 
with service, often standing firm upon a scruple, 
and at a certain cost, rejecting riches : — every- 
where some virtue cherished or affected, every- 
where some decency of thought and carriage, 



PULVIS ET UMBRA 

/erywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual good- 
ness: — ah! if I could show you this! if I could 
show you these men and women, all the world 
over, in every stage of history, under every abuse 
of error, under every circumstance of failure, 
without hope, without help, without thanks, still 
obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still 
clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some 
rag of honour, the poor jewel of their souls ! They 
may seek to escape, and yet they cannot ; it is not 
alone their privilege and glory, but their doom ; 
they are condemned to some nobility; all their 
lives long, the desire of good is at their heels, the 
implacable hunter. 

Of all earth's meteors, here at least is the most 
strange and consoling: that this ennobled lemur, 
this hair-crowned bubble of the dust, this inheritor 
of a few years and sorrows, should yet deny him- 
self his rare delights, and add to his frequent 
pains, and live for an ideal, however misconceived. 
Nor can we stop with man. A new doctrine, re- 
ceived with screams a little while ago by canting 
moralists, and still not properly worked into the 



PULVIS ET UMBRA \ ^2r5 

body of our thoughts, lights us a step farther iiic. 
the heart of this rough but noble universe. For 
nowadays the pride of man denies in vain his kin- 
ship with the original dust. He stands no longer 
like a thing apart. Close at his heels we see the 
dog, prince of another genus : and in him too, we 
see dumbly testified the same cultus of an unat- 
tainable ideal, the same constancy in failure. Does 
it stop with the dog? We look at our feet where 
the ground is blackened with the swarming ant: 
a creature so small, so far from us in the hierarchy 
of brutes, that we can scarce trace and scarce com- 
prehend his doings; and here also, in his ordered 
polities and rigorous justice, we see confessed the 
law of duty and the fact of individual sin. Does 
it stop, then, with the ant? Rather this desire of 
well-doing and this doom of frailty run through 
all the grades of life : rather is this earth, from the 
frosty top of Everest to the next margin of the 
internal fire, one stage of ineffectual virtues and 
one temple of pious tears and perseverance. The 
whole creation groaneth and travaileth together. 
It is the common and the god-like law of life. The 



. PULVIS ET UMBRA 

orowsers, the biters, the barkers, the hairy coats 
of field and forest, the squirrel in the oak, the 
thousand-footed creeper in the dust, as they share 
with us the gift of life, share with us the love of an 
ideal : strive like us — like us are tempted to grow 
weary of the struggle — to do well ; like us receive 
at times unmerited refreshment, visitings of sup- 
port, returns of courage; and are condemned like 
us to be crucified between that double law of the 
members and the will. Are they like us, I wonder, 
in the timid hope of some reward, some sugar with 
the drug ? do they, too, stand aghast at unrewarded 
virtues, at the sufferings of those whom, in our 
partiality, we take to be just, and the prosperity 
of such as, in our blindness, we call wicked? It 
may be, and yet God knows what they should look 
for. Even while they look, even while they repent, 
the foot of man treads them by thousands in the 
dust, the yelping hounds burst upon their trail, the 
bullet speeds, the knives are heating in the den of 
the vivisectionist ; or the dew falls, and the gen- 
eration of a day is blotted out. For these are 
creatures, compared with whom our weakness 



PULVIS ET UMBRA ->^'^ 

is strength, our ignorance wisdom, our brief spai. ' 
eternity. 

And as we dwell, we living things, in our isle of 
terror and under the imminent hand of death, God 
forbid it should be man the erected, the reasoner, 
the wise in his own eyes — God forbid it should 
be man that wearies in well-doing, that despairs of 
unrewarded effort, or utters the language of com- 
plaint. Let it be enough for faith, that the whole 
creation groans in mortal frailty, strives with 
unconquerable constancy : surely not all in vain. 



A CHRISTMAS SERMON 

BY the time this paper appears, I shall have 
been talking for twelve months ; ^ and it 
is thought I should take my leave in a for- 
mal and seasonable manner. Valedictory elo- 
quence is rare, and death-bed sayings have not 
often hit the mark of the occasion. Charles Sec- 
ond, wit and sceptic, a man wdiose life had been 
one long lesson in human incredulity, an easy- 
.'ping comrade, a manoeuvring king — remem- 
bered and embodied all his wit and scepticism 
along with more than his usual good-humour in 
the famous '' I am afraid, gentlemen, I am an un- 
conscionable time a-dying." 

I 

An unconscionable time a-dying — there is the 
picture (''I am afraid, gentlemen,'') of your life 
and of mine. The sands run out, and the hours 

1 /. e. in the pages of Scribner^s Magazine (1888). 



A CHRISTMAS SERMON \^2rS 

are " numbered and imputed," and the days g v 
by; and when the last of these finds us, we have 
been a long time dying, and what else? The very 
length is something, if we reach that hour of sepa- 
ration undishonoured ; and to have lived at all is 
doubtless (in the soldierly expression) to have 
served. There is a tale in Tacitus of how the 
veterans mutinied in the German wilderness ; of 
how they mobbed Germanicus, clamouring to go 
home; and of how, seizing their general's hand, 
these old, war-worn exiles passed his finger along 
their toothless gums. Sunt lacrymce rertim: this 
was the most eloquent of the songs of Simeon. 
And when a man has lived to a fair age, he bears 
his marks of service. He may have never been 
remarked upon the breach at the head of the army ; 
at least he shall have lost his teeth on the camp 
bread. 

The idealism of serious people in this age of 
ours is of a noble character. It never seems to 
them that they have served enough ; they have a 
fine impatience of their virtues. It were perhaps 
more modest to be singly thankful that we are no 



. A CHRISTMAS SERMON 

a'orse. It is not only our enemies, those des- 
perate characters — it is we ourselves who know 
not what we do ; — thence springs the glimmer- 
ing hope that perhaps we do better than wx think : 
that to scramble through this random business with 
hands reasonably clean, to have played the part 
of a man or woman with some reasonable fulness, 
to have often resisted the diabolic, and at the end 
to be still resisting it, is for the poor human sol- 
dier to have done right well. To ask to see some 
fruit of our endeavour is but a transcendental way 
of serving for reward; and what we take to be 
contempt of self is only greed of hire. 

And again if we require so much of ourselves, 
shall we not require much of others? If we do 
not genially judge our own deficiencies, is it not 
to be feared we shall be even stern to the tres- 
passes of others? And he who (looking back upon 
his own life) can see no more than that he has 
been unconscionably long a-dying, will he not be 
tempted to think his neighbour unconscionably 
long of getting hanged ? It is probable that nearly 
all who think of conduct at all, think of it too 



A CHRISTMAS SERMON 'X^^rS 

much ; it is certain we all think too much of sin. ^' 
We are not damned for doing wrong, but for not 
doing right; Christ would never hear of negative 
morality; thou shalt was ever his word, with 
which he superseded thou shalt not. To make our 
idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to 
defile the imagination and to introduce into our 
judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of 
gusto. If a thing is wrong for us, we should not 
dwell upon the thought* of it; or we shall soon 
dwell upon it with inverted pleasure. If we can- 
not drive it from our minds — one thing of two : 
either our creed is in the wrong and we must more 
indulgently remodel it; or else, if our morality be 
in the right, we are criminal lunatics and should 
place our persons in restraint. A mark of such 
unwholesomely divided minds is the passion for 
interference with others : the Fox without the Tail 
was of this breed, but had (if his biographer is to 
be trusted) a certain antique civility now out of 
date. A man may have a flaw, a weakness, that 
unfits him for the duties of life, that spoils his tem- 
per, that threatens his integrity, or that betrays 



/ A CHRISTMAS SERMON 

him into cruelty. It has to be conquered; but it 
must never be suffered to engross his thouglits. 
The true duties lie all upon the farther side, and 
must be attended to with a whole mind so soon as 
this preliminary clearing of the decks has been 
effected. In order that he may be kind and honest, 
it may be needful he should become a total ab- 
stainer; let him become so then, and the next day 
let him forget the circumstance. Trying to be 
kind and honest will require all his thoughts ; a 
mortified appetite is never a wise companion; in 
so far as he has had to mortify an appetite, he will 
still be the worse man ; and of such an one a great 
deal of cheerfulness will be required in judging 
life, and a great deal of humility in judging 
others. 

It may be argued again that dissatisfaction with 
our life's endeavour springs in some degree from 
dulness. We require higher tasks, because we do 
not recognise the height of those we have. Trying 
to be kind and honest seems an affair too simple 
and too inconsequential for gentlemen of our 
heroic mould; we had rather set ourselves to 



A CHRISTMAS SERMON . 2r5 

something bold, arduous, and conclusive; we hal 
rather found a schism or suppress a heresy, cut 
off a hand or mortify an appetite. But the task 
before us, which is to co-endure with our existence, 
is rather one of microscopic fineness, and the hero- 
ism required is that of patience. There is no cut- 
ting of the Gordian knots of life; each must be 
smilingly unravelled. 

To be honest, to be kind — to earn a little and 
to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a 
family happier for his presence, to renounce when 
that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to 
keep a few friends but these without capitulation 
— above all, on the same grim condition, to keep 
friends with himself — here is a task for all that 
a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an 
ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a 
hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise 
to be successful. There is indeed one element in 
human destiny that not blindness itself can con- 
trovert : whatever else we are intended to do, we 
are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate 
allotted. It is so in every art and study; it is so 



/a CHRISTMAS SERMON 

above all in the continent art of living well. Here 
is a pleasant thought for the year's end or for the 
end of life: Only self-deception will be satisfied, 
and there need be no despair for the despairer. 

II 

But Christmas is not only the mile-mark of 
another year, moving us to thoughts of self-exam- 
ination : it is a season, from all its associations, 
whether domestic or religious, suggesting thoughts 
of joy. A man dissatisfied with his endeavours is 
a man tempted to sadness. And in the midst of 
the winter, when his life runs lowest and he is 
reminded of the empty chairs of his beloved, it 
is well he should be condemned to this fashion of 
the smiling face. Noble disappointment, noble 
self-denial are not to be admired, not even to be 
pardoned, if they bring bitterness. It is one thing 
to enter the kingdom of heaven maim ; another to 
maim yourself and stay without. And the king- 
dom of heaven is of the childlike, of those who are 
easy to please, who love and who give pleasure. 
Mighty men of their hands, the smiters and the 



A CHRISTMAS SERMON i 2rS 

builders and the judges, have Hved long and done 
sternly and yet preserved this lovely character; 
and among our carpet interests and twopenny con- 
cerns, the shame were indelible if zue should lose 
it. Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before 
all morality; they are the perfect duties. And it 
is the trouble with moral men that they have 
neither one nor other. It was the moral man, the 
Pharisee, whom Christ could not away with. If 
your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they 
are wrong. I do not say " give them up," for they 
may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, 
lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler 
people. 

A strange temptation attends upon man : to 
keep his eye on pleasures, even when he will not 
share in them ; to aim all his morals against them. 
This very year a lady (singular iconoclast!) pro- 
claimed a crusade against dolls; and the racy 
sermon against lust is a feature of the age. I 
venture to call such moralists insincere. At any 
excess or perversion of a natural appetite, their 
lyre sounds of itself with relishing denunciations; 



/ A CHRISTMAS SERMON 

but for all displays of the truly diabolic — envy, 
malice, the mean lie, the mean silence, the calum- 
nious truth, the backbiter, the petty tyrant, the 
peevish poisoner of family life — their standard 
is quite different. These are wrong, they will 
admit, yet somehow not so wrong; there is no 
zeal in their assault on them, no secret element of 
gusto warms up the sermon ; it is for things not 
wTong in themselves that they reserve the choicest 
of their indignation. A man may naturally dis- 
claim all moral kinship with the Reverend Mr. 
Zola or the hobgoblin old lady of the dolls; for 
these are gross and naked instances. And yet in 
each of us some similar element resides. The sight 
of a pleasure in which w'e cannot or else will not 
share moves us to a particular impatience. It may 
be because we are envious, or because we are sad, 
or because we dislike noise and romping — being 
so refined, or because — being so philosophic — we 
have an overweighing sense of life's gravity : at 
least, as we go on in years, we are all tempted 
to frown upon our neighbour's pleasures. People 
are nowadays so fond of resisting temptations; 



A CHRISTMAS SERMON . 2r5 

here is one to be resisted. They are fond of sell ., 
denial ; here is a propensity that cannot be too 
peremptorily denied. There is an idea abroad 
among moral people that they should make their 
neighbours good. One person I have to make 
good : myself. But my duty to my neighbour is 
much more nearly expressed by saying that I have 
to make him happy — if I may. 

Ill 

Happiness and goodness, according to canting 
moralists, stand in the relation of effect and cause. 
There was never anything less proved or less prob- 
able : our happiness is never in our own hands; 
we inherit our constitution ; we stand buffet among 
friends and enemies ; we may be so built as to feel 
a sneer or an aspersion with unusual keenness, and 
so circumstanced as to be unusually exposed to 
them ; we may have nerves very sensitive to pain, 
and be afflicted with a disease very painful. Virtue 
will not help us, and it is not meant to help us. It 
is not even its own reward, except for the self- 
centred and — I had almost said — the unamiable. 

19 



J^ A CHRISTMAS SERMON 

bMo man can pacify his conscience; if quiet be 
what he want, he shall do better to let that organ 
perish from disuse. And to avoid the penalties of 
the law, and the minor capitis diminutio of social 
ostracism, is an affair of wisdom — of cunning, if 
you will — and not of virtue. 

In his own life, then, a man is not to expect 
happiness, only to profit by it gladly when it shall 
arise; he is on duty here; he knows not how or 
why, and does not need to know ; he knows not for 
what hire, and must not ask. Somehow or other, 
though he does not know what goodness is, he 
must try to be good ; somehow or other, though 
he cannot tell what will do it, he must try to give 
happiness to others. And no doubt there comes in 
here a frequent clash of duties. How far is he 
to make his neighbour happy? How far must he 
respect that smiling face, so easy to cloud, so hard 
to brighten again? And how far, on the other 
side, is he bound to be his brother's keeper and 
the prophet of his own morality? How far must 
he resent evil? 

The difficulty is that we have little guidance; 



A CHRISTMAS SERMON ^'^ 

Christ's sayings on the point being hard to recon 
cile with each other, and (the most of them) hard 
to accept. But the truth of his teaching would 
seem to be this: in our own person and fortune, 
we should be ready to accept and to pardon all ; 
it is our cheek we are to turn, otir coat that we are 
to give away to the man who has taken our cloak. 
But when another's face is buffeted, perhaps a little 
of the lion will become us best. That we are to 
suffer others to be injured, and stand by, is not 
conceivable and surely not desirable. Revenge, 
says Bacon, is a kind of w^ild justice ; its judgments 
at least are delivered by an insane judge; and in 
our own quarrel we can see nothing truly and do 
nothing wisely. But in the quarrel of our neigh- 
bour, let us be more bold. One person's happiness 
is as sacred as another's; when we cannot defend 
both, let us defend one with a stout heart. It is 
only in so far as we are doing this, that we have 
any right to interfere : the defence of B is our 
only ground of action against A. A has as good a 
right to go to the devil, as we to go to glory ; and 
neither knows what he does. 



.56/ A CHRISTMAS SERMON 

The truth is that all these interventions and 
denunciations and militant mongerings of moral 
half-truths, though they be sometimes needful, 
though they are often enjoyable, do yet belong to 
an inferior grade of duties. Ill-temper and envy 
and revenge find here an arsenal of pious dis- 
guises; this is the playground of inverted lusts. 
With a little more patience and a little less temper, 
a gentler and wiser method might be found in 
almost every case; and the knot that we cut by 
some fine heady quarrel-scene in private life, or, 
in public affairs, by some denunciatory act against 
what w^e are pleased to call our neighbour's vices, 
might yet have been unwoven by the hand of 
sympathy. 

IV 

To look back upon the past year, and see how 
little we have striven and to what small purpose; 
and how often we have been cowardly and hung 
back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and 
how every day and all day long we have trans- 
gressed the law of kindness ; — it may seem a 



A CHRISTMAS SERMON 2cS 

paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoverit 
a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed 
to minister to a man's vanity. He goes upon his 
long business most of the time with a hanging 
head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of 
rewards and pleasures as it is — so that to see the 
day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, 
or to hear the dinner-call when he is hungry, fills 
him with surprising joys — this world is yet for 
him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, 
health fails, weariness assails him ; year after 
year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of 
his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly pro- 
cess of detachment. When the time comes that he 
should go, there need be few illusions left about 
himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a 
littl^, failed much: — surely that may be his epi- 
taph, of which he need not be ashamed. Nor will 
ae complain at the summons which calls a defeated 
sodier from the field: defeated, ay, if he were 

, Paul or Marcus Aurelius! — but if there is still 
one inch of fight in his old spirit, undishonoured. 

|The faith which sustained him in his life-long 



^ ^4 A CHRISTMAS SERMON 

blindness and life-long disappointment will r ^ •'^" 
even be required in this last formality of layi.'^ •* 
down his arms. Give him a march with his old 
bones; there, out of the glorious sun-coloured 
earth, out of the day and the dust and the ecstas}/ 
— there goes another Faithful Failure ! 

From a recent book of verse, where there is morq|E 
than one such beautiful and manly poem, I take 
this memorial piece : it says better than I can, what 
I love to think; let it be our parting word. 



" A late lark twitters from the quiet skies ; 
And from^the west, 
Where the sun, his day's work ended, 
Lingers as in content, 
There falls on the old, grey city 
An influence luminous and serene, 
A shining peace. 

*' The smoke ascends 
In a rosy-and-golden haze. The spires 
Shine, and are changed. In the valley 
Shadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun, 
Closing his benediction. 
Sinks, and the darkening air 
Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night — 
Night, with her train of stars 
And her great gift of sleep. 



A CHRISTMAS SERMON 295 

,-- A ^o be my passing! 

My task accomplished and the long day done, 

My wages taken, and in my heart 

Some late lark singing, 

Let me be gathered to the quiet west, 

The sundown splendid and serene, 

Death." i 

1 From A Book of Verses by William Ernest Henley. D. Nutt, 

888. 

[1888.] 



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